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I mainly play this encounter as a damage dealer so I will focus on this part but I try to get you an overall picture.

The whole strategy to this fight is about maximising the dps, but it’s not just about burst but also about sustained damage.

Phase 1:

We play this phase with one tank who runs around Sara. The melee dps stays there – with decent gear you can take the explosions when you are topped. You have to look for your low-hp-players which basically means enhancement shamans. And we call out the debuffs on the melees so they can run out of the centre before the guardian explodes.

Although it’s obvious I mention it here because I’ve seen in several logs that ferals forget about their class. In this fight it’s much better to invest your combo points in savage roar instead of another ferocious bite. Restacking CPs is a pain in the ass. Normally I start with a 1/2-CP-SR and stack another 4/5 CP on the first and renew SR so I have long buff time. From the second guardian you can always start with a 4/5-CP-Rip and restack 3 or 4 new CP which you spend alternatingly in FB or SR. This way you should have a 100% uptime of SR with high damage output.

Although it’s also obvious you shouldn’t trigger any cloud but overall it’s not directly a wipe if you do. Depending on your raid you can handle one or two additional triggers but probably not more.

Phase 2:

Our goal at the start of phase 2 is to kill immediately the first crusher with ranged dps. Our tank tanks the crushers so we don’t have the dmg-reduction. Until the first portals the melees kill the small tentacles.

The most important thing for the melees is to stand at your portal when it spawns. We also assign every melee to a single tentacle in the vision. We have a hunter in one portal so he can give aspect of the pack after the brain is reachable. We also have an healer with us because we could kill us without a healer.

Our time goal are 15 seconds to kill all tentacles down there with a maximum of 18-20 seconds but 20 seconds are already very bad.

It’s very important to improve the last transition. It makes no sense to “kill” the brain as far as you can. If you need a third portal phase then kill the brain with 2 or 3 seconds left so the ranged can kill all tentacles above.

The faster you are down the easier it’s up.

I try to get a 3/4/5-CP-SR just before I take the portal. You can get your CP on a small tentacle. If you get this right you can kill your tentacle right away without the need to renew SR. Again this whole fight is about maximising your overall damage and as a kittycat from hell SR-uptime is crucial.

Phase 3:

When you have Thorim helping Phase3 is pretty easy. The only thing you have to deal with is his roar but you can counter this with Aura Mastery of your paladins.

When you don’t have any watcher helping the phase3 is obviously the hardest one. The tricky thing is to deal with Empowering Shadows. YS marks three guardians with this buff and you have 10 seconds to spot these and pull them away of the other guardians and YS himself so you don’t have to much healing.

There are several strategies to reach this goal. We do this with 3 hunters and me as backup. We use an addon to mark all “Marked Immortal Guardians” and every hunter taunts their symbol and runs away.

My suggestion to this phase is pretty obvious: 3/3 Feral Instinct. 30% more swipe damage is awesome in this fight where you probably just spam this single spell after the first Beacon.

I had pretty good drop luck and after my first raid evening I had around 10 new items. The next day we did Archavon’s Vault and Ulduar10 which ended me with the four-piece-T7-bonus after two days. In Ulduar I had to stand beside for Algalon which was fine to me.

The next ID was even more insane. We ran into Ulduar25 and the drop luck continued. At first I should leave for the hard modes of Mimiron and Freya but because of player shortage I was finally allowed and performed quite well. I even got the first drop of Dreambinder and I was amazed that main hunters passed this item to me.

On Friday we revisited Ulduar10 and I was allowed to face Algalon. We pushed my gear and it went well and I got my 2nd title. On Saturday I probably was the first Starcaller who earned the basic achievements in Naxx10 as I didn’t had enough time so far.

But the best part was after the weekend when we went to Algalon25 which was still unbeaten on our server. In our second attempt we were finally rewarded with the kill and 8 days after reaching level80 I was part of my first true server firstkill. Of course I didn’t help to learn this encounter but I didn’t fuck up with this encounter and performed quite well so although I wasn’t part of the learning time I helped to finish it.

This is now 2 weeks ago and we are working on Yogg+0 and I hope that we will kill it this ID. With the new instance being a joke in normal mode and decreasing time in Ulduar we will eventually get free raid nights and I look forward into this because this is one reason of my switch.

I want to raid in an environment where my time is not wasted by poor players. I want to raid cyclically with high effort in progress times and low effort in farm times so I have finally more time for other things like other games, puzzles, series, books and I want to learn something about photo editing. Well, let’s see what future has ready for me.

Level10-14:
Ferocity
less rage needed

Level15:
major glyph: Maul
minor glyph: Thorns

Level15-16:
Savage Fury
more damage is always good

Level17-19:
Feral Instinct

Level20:
change Maul with Claw-glyph

Level20-21:
Feral Swiftness
faster movement is essential while leveling

Level22-24:
Sharpened Claws

Level24:
change Claw with Rake-glyph. You mostly will die because of added mobs

Level25-26:
Primal Precision
when you level as fast as I did you will mostly face orange or even red mobs

Level27-28:
Primal Fury
although Rake deals more damage than rip, this helps to keep Rip up

Level29-31:
Predatory Strikes

Level30:
2nd major glyph: Claw

Level32:
Feral Charge

Level33-34:
Nurturing Instinct
it reduces downtimes even more because your self-heal increases

Level35-37:
Survival of the Fittest

Level38-39:
2 points in Heart of the Wild

Level40-42:
Leader of the Pack and Improved LotP
You won’t have any downtimes any more

Level43-45:
Heart of the Wild

Level46-48:
Infected Wounds

Level49:
1 point in Predatory Instincts

Level50:
Mangle
change glyph: Claw with Rip
remove Claw from your bar

Level51-53:
Improved Mangle

Level54:
1 point in King of the Jungle

Level55-59:
Rend and Tear

Level60:
Primal Gore

Level61:
Berserk

Level62-63:
Improved Mark of the Wild

Level64-66:
3 points in Furor

Level67-71:
Naturalist

Level70:
Minor-glyh: Dash

Level72:
Omen of Clarity
I use Powerauras to visualize Clearcast-procs so I can use them more effectively.

Level73-74:
King of the Jungle

Level75-77:
Natural Shapeshifter

Level78-79:
Master Shapeshifter

Level80:
respecc to a real feral build. Either bear or cat need different builds for endgame. When you just want one feral build to quest or tank 5-mans this is what I would suggest this:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#0ZxGGsfrzceRc0uAkbA0z:zVpzcV

My new guild was really helpful. I didn’t ask often for help but they offered for themself. I just asked when otherwise I would have to travel a lot for few quests or I would have to quest in terrible areas.

Since mid40 it became better and better and I needed around 60-90 minutes for a level – including afk-idling while preparing something to eat etc.

As I said I started on a sunday and had promised to need 2 weeks to reach 80. I had lots of holidays left so I took the second week off. So my real leveling phase started on Friday afternoon which I started with level30. The next week went like a breeze. I leveled quite easy and during the evening I listened to the raids to keep my motivation up. The last weekend was a guild real life gathering so very few people were online during these days.

But I wanted to reach my promise to ding on Sunday. While I raced through Borean and the Fjord I were terribly slow in the mid-70s. Saturday I went to bed with still being 75.

So Sunday was the final spurt of this leveling race and I had still 4.5 level to go. I went up early because this didn’t let me sleep (strange, I know). Someone of the guild helped me with the Dragonblight elite quests and both arenas and while I quested through Grizzly hills and early Zul’Drak I dinged 77. I immediatly switched to Sholazar Basin and leveling sped up enourmusly. Although I skinned and herbed a lot my level-speed was much faster. I needed less than 3 hours to reach 78 and 79 nearly as fast as 78.

I already started the important quest rows to be able to grind reputation and around 10 o’clock in the evening I finally dinged 80. What a relief! My new guild helped me a lot during the leveling process but the real help came after this. I had proven that I could reach my goal very fast purposive – now they proved, that they believed in me, but this will be the topic of one of my next posts.

In the last weeks and months I simply had no energy to write new posts but I experienced enough to write some new posts. The upcoming change will provide material too.

So: what happened since my last post und why?

I played in a raid which lived in its past which means we all thought how awesome we are because we cleared Sunwell. What we didn’t see was that the raid has changed since these times. Some core players have quit and had to be replaced.

Additionally not just the raid has changed but also the instances as well. I don’t speak about Naxxramas but Ulduar. Naxx was so stupidly easy that it covered that we weren’t the good raid we thought we are. However Ulduar was much more demanding than Naxxramas and the hardmodes are even harder on a personal basis than Sunwell.

In Sunwell a single raid leader could announce every important ability and force the raid to react. In Ulduar hard modes every single player has to understand the fights and what’s even more important he has to decide for himself what’s the est way to react.

Why do I stress these differences? Well as I already told in my former posts I play a protection warrior. At least I used to play. During Ulduar I realized how much underpowered the warrior is and that the warrior isn’t the perfect main tank any more. He is probably the best off tank but not the main tank.

It’s no problem when the differences to other tank classes are minor ones but the gap got bigger and bigger with equipment. In the end I was forced to watch other tanks doing the interesting fights and I had to see how they failed in plain simple situations because of poor playstyle.

That was the moment when I decided to reroll on my druid. I used to play him as restoration but I already had some nice feral items. So I dropped herbalism and pushed leatherworking. I pushed my reputation with Hodir etc. I bought the BoE-items. I ran Naxxramas again. I ran Ulduar10 with an alt-group after our regular raids. Short: I invested pretty much in short time and after two weeks I was able to switch my chars.

I changed my Ulduar25-warrior with my Naxx25/Ulduar10-feral and was able to soak more damage. This approved my decision together with the direct feedback of my healers that I was easier to heal. Shortly after this I also got the confirmation of Ghostcrawler himself with his (in)famous thread why they didn’t buff warriors (population > actuals stats).

As I said I invested quite some time into this switch and realized that many players in my raid were just slacking these efforts. When my druid was ready I had to face the same problems I also had to face with my warrior. Well after some weeks it’s obvious but back then I hoped that the problems would vanish and that I for myself could solve the problems of the raid.

But what were the problems? Like many other raids we raid 5 days a week the 25-man-content. This doesn’t leave much time for the 10-man-content. Ulduar10 can’t be cleared on one day when you also try to do hardmode-progress and many players didn’t want to sacrifice some time of the weekends even if it would mean that this would only affect a few weekends.

With these conditions we struggled through Ulduar10. We always wanted to provide all players the possibility to clear Ulduar10 and also to defeat the hard modes. I learned Freya+3 in 4 different raid groups always from the ground up.

Additionally in the raid pool was quite some difference between the skills of the players especcially between the healers. There were healers where you simply rushed through the instance and with some others you really had to know your own cooldowns to survive even the simplest situations.

Well these are normal problems of nearly every raid but there were other problems I simply couldn’t deal with any more. Really simple problems like tardiness or unreliability. We wasted three Algalon-hours because of these simple problems. We couldn’t build strong setups to defeat him because people didn’t show up. We didn’t got further than the first Big Bang because of always the same stupid healer mistakes. Additionally we had much trouble with our 25-man-progress. Well, we could defeat all the simple hard modes and I think this blinded some players about the real situation because on the paper we indeed had progress.

After another wasted Algalon-ID where our restrictions again were mainly unreliability by some players I decided that I didn’t want this any more. In my heart this feeling grew over the past weeks. I wanted to play again in a raid where everyone gives his best and where everyone questions himself.

The actual decision was a quick one. I wrote a short sentence to one of the leaders of the best guild of our server – although the were on the other faction. I wrote “are you searching for gear or skill”. Of course this was quite a bit suggestive but it should answer my real question: would they take me even if I wouldn’t have any gear or worse even wouldn’t have the required level to raid yet.

I offered to create a new account (because I play on a pvp server) and to speed level a new char. They could decide if this should be a feral or protection warrior. They needed quite a time to decide this – I think they discussed this offer for about 30 seconds – and accepted it.

I started directly my new main char – a druid again as they wanted it. The leveling adventures will be covered by my next post but the struggle with my now old raid wasn’t over for this day.

I announced my decision directly to some in TeamSpeak and while we discussed my decision the channel slowly filled. It was quite interesting to watch the reactions of all the people when they discovered what I was up to. The reactions reached from understanding to open accusations. What I found most interesting was that people said that I abandoned them who never where available when I needed them. Well this discussion strengthened my desision and I started my new toon – Batmenk! (some call him Batmenk the Betrayer but I can live with that).

Currently I experiment a little bit with Unrelenting Assault. The idea behind this spec is to maximize the threat because of 1 second Revenge cooldown. My experiences so far:

• you reduce your rotation to Revenge+Heroic Strike. Everything else is bad for your threat.
• I need to optimize my gear. I need more block rating and avoidance. I had times when Revenge wasn’t up. You can fill these gaps with Shield Slam and Mortal Strike but they produce less threat.
• I wonder if it would be wise to use the Rend glyph and apply Rend. Rend would last 21 seconds and tick 7 times. It ticks for 400 damage with my tank gear which would mean 2800 damage. This would be a little more than normal Revenge but less than a crit.
• it’s better when another warrior keeps Sunder Armor up

When you follow the circle from the right to the left you will face Hodir, Thorim, Freya and Mimiron in that order.

Hodir

Hodir is in fact the most basic WoW encounter in terms of “don’t stand in shit”.He is tanked by one tank. There are strategies to use two tanks but this is absolutely not necessary. It helps that the tank uses frost resistance gear. This is because of a special buff he casts sometimes on him. With this Frozen Blows buff he practically changes his melee hits in frost attacks which will hit harder when you don’t lower these with resistances.

The two-tank-strategy uses one pure frost-resistance tank and one normal tank but in our opinion you don’t need multiple tanks – one tank is enough. In our raid this is normally our tankadin so I switch to my noob-ms-gear but I keep sunder armor on Hodir.

He will constantly throws ice-cubes-stones-things-bla on you but he’s nice and draws a circle, where it will land. You have plenty of time to run out of these circles. When you stay in these circles you will eat a lot of damage.

He will also cast after some time two big circles and then a long casted non-interruptable Flash Freeze. Your job is to run to the big circles but not on them. You have to wait until the ice-cubes-stones-things-bla has fallen down. The circles will now be covered with snow. Everyone who doesn’t stand on this snow or at a fire (see below) will be put in an ice block which has to be destroyed.

Speaking of ice blocks. When you enter the room you will already see 8 ice blocks with NPCs in them. When you start the fight you should destroy these blocks as the NPCs will help you with additional damage and (more important) buffs.

The last thing is an aura which stacks a debuff when you don’t move. It’s quite similar to the debuff in Nexus endboss but it won’t be removed completely but one per tick. When you try to stack your buffs and while being not hit by ice-cubes-stones-things-bla you already will move a lot which should deal with the debuff.

As a summary: stand out of circles, get buffs, hit hard, stand on snow, kill ice blocks.

The main problem is that Ulduar has a very straight design through the four stages. Although you can decide a little bit which bosses you try first per stage you have to kill the four keepers before you can go to Yogg Saron.

The problem you will run into is how much time will you save for the last bosses? You will run into the decision if you want to try the boss in hard mode or if you want to kill it in easy mode to be able to kill Yogg Saron.

The earlier the hard mode is you want to try the earlier you will face this decision. Do you really want to try another hour Hodir in hard mode and perhaps fail at the General for more tries than expected.

Everyone knows this kind of problem but we never had to face it so heavily. I think the normal way will be to save the Assembly of Iron for the last day because it’s a optional boss. You want to clear the rest up to the Keepers at the first day. Then you can try hard modes on the keepers but you want to have the last day for the General and Yogg Saron until you can one-shot them which will take some weeks I think.

The problem will be much more in 10-man-Ulduar because you have lesser time. We probably have just 2 days and optional two hours before the raid on sunday. At the first day we probably want to kill everything up to the Keepers and then try one for some hours in hard-mode. This will slow down our progress and is purely a time problem. At some point we will have to decide if we want to clear now in easy mode.

In every other instance you progressed linear through the instance – loot- and encounter-wise. Ulduar will show if the new concept works.

The Assembly of Iron

This encounter is often referred to as “The Iron Council” – mainly because it contains three iron – well dwarves. The difficulty in this fight depends on the killing order. The easiest way is from big to small. The medium difficulty is to kill the medium one at last and the hardest order is to save the big monster for the end.

Steelbreaker: This big fat guy hits pretty hard. In easy killing order there are just two things you have to deal with. The first is the fusion punch. This is a hard punch which leaves a debuff that ticks every second. This has to be removed instantly. The punch has a 3 second cast time which leaves enough time to react. The best way to remove this debuff is a retribution paladin. He has Steelbreaker as target and sees the cast very easiely. With a macro he can dispell instantly so the tank doesn’t eat a single tick.

The other problem is the Rune of Power which is cast be the medium dwarf. Steelbreaker has to be pulled out of this rune as fast as possible. The tank should use a cooldown while kiting him because it takes some time.

Runemaster Molgeim: He is the one with the runes. He casts the Rune of Power which buffs everyone in this rune. He puts it under one of the three bosses but it buffs also players inside this rune so it’s very helpful that ranged DD stand inside this rune (but not too much because of the chain lightning of the small one). He also buffs himself with a shield which absorbs damage.  The shield should be purged because he deals more damage, when the shield can absorb the full damage.

When the first one is dead he can cast a big rune of death which basically is just a void zone.

Stormcaller Brundir: The small one casts chain lightning on random players. Although he can be ignored at first it’s better to put a tank on him. You can interrupt his casts and when he can’t cast he runs to the number one in aggro list which normally is a healer. When a tank is on him he won’t run. He shouldn’t be in the camp because he also casts an overload which is a pretty hard hitting 30y-AoE which deals 30k damage. So healers would need to run away from him which reduces heal output significantly.

When the first is down he also casts a lightning whirl. This is a channeled cast (5 seconds) which deals massive aoe damage and should be interrupted. While there is another dwarf he also can be stunned.

When both others are down he sometimes flies in the air and follows a random player for 5 seconds while doing massive damage below him. Get away from him and the followed player. After following some players he will land and resets aggro.

The tank of the first mob should also switch to him when his mob is down.

Kologarn

At first: you can fall down so beware! At second: The Right Arm is on your left!

His arms can be targeted separately but melee doesn’t have to move. The left arm is going to be ignored and randomly does a shockwave on the raid. The right arm graps three players and squeezes them. Either you deal 450k damage on the arm in 8 seconds or he kills at least one or he increases his grip which kills all three players. When one arm is killed he looses 15% health so it’s the best to just focus the right arm. When an arm is killed some earth elementals spawn. One tank picks them up and they are killed by ranged dps (they have a short range aoe effect). After one minute the arm respawns.

He also does an eyebeam. He casts two beams which meet at the targeted player. They have to be kited so they don’t hit the raid.

He makes a stacking armor reduce on the tank and one off tank should taunt when the MT has 2 stacks on him. We have two tanks dealing with Kologarn and one tank assigned to the earth elementals.

Auriaya

The most difficult with this fight is the pull. She patrols the circle and has 4 cats with her. The problem are these cats because they jump onto everyone on aggro list and range in sight.

The trick is to put the whole raid out of line of sight during the pull. The pull itself depends on the raid. We have done it with death and decay, hunter pets or imp pull. Also thinkable would be totems, bubble pull or what else. I think you got the clue. the four cats are tanked by two tanks and they deal a lot of damage. The main tank taunts Auriaya herself and pulls her slightly out of the raid while standing between her and the raid.

Auriaya has two abilities for herself. The first one is a combination of mass fear followed by a aoe debuff which deals huge damage but can and should be interrupted. It’s possible to pre-counter the fear with berserker rage of the warrior. When she casts her Horrifying Screech just hit your Berserker Rage and wait for Sonic Blast to interrupt.

The second ability is her Sonic Screech which deals massive damage but is devided between everyone in front of her. That’s why the raid should always be behind the tank so you should run fast back to your position.

She summons a pack of cats which gets aoe’d. She also summons a feral defender. This cat has 9 lives but with every respawn it deals less damage. It jumps wildly through the camp and should be stunned. It can’t be tanked as it resets the aggro. It leaves a void zone where it dies. You can be lucky with death gripping or kicking it out of the raid in the time of death but the simpliest way is to just move her.

After you learned the pull this fight is pretty straight forward.