Head Banging

I spent Saturday night down in the mosh pit at Archimonde's feet, learning the fight, getting blasted into the air and watching trails of fire get run through the crowds. We "beat our heads" against Archi for a couple of hours and I think we got a good handle on that encounter.

On one hand, it's primarily a survival battle, not a dps race. Archi does many things that can kill you and if you die, he gets a "soul charge" buff which largely means everybody else dies too. The methods he has for killing you include: a Grip curse, an Air blast and the fire you aren't supposed to stand in. The Grip is the easiest to cope with. It needs to be cleared quickly, but since both druids and mages can clear it, it's generally under control. A minor challenge is that druids can't clear the curse while in dps form (or healing?) so the decursing druids have to focus on pretty much just that.

The Air blast just takes a little practice. You pick up an item, Tears, before the encounter which slows your falling speed for 2s. You go flying up in the air, wait a bit, then proc the Tears and land with minimal damage (proportional to how well you time the item).

The fire trails are both the simplest and hardest element. Why, after all this time, is not standing in the fire so hard? That's not even meant to be critical, it just seems to be simple fact. The game pushes you to focus on your primary job so much that local area effects like fire just sneak up on you. In addition the usual "don't stand in the fire," here, the fire chases you and you have to be heads up about running away from Archi and also not at your teammates.

We focused primarily on surviving on Saturday night and not cranking the dps. But the other side of treating it as a survival battle is that if/when we go all out on dps, the fight will be significantly shorter and it'll be easier to survive. It does look like it will take 5-6m to win. We were able to get to around 2m without wipe-worthy errors on Saturday.

I did feel pretty optimistic about the fight and would like to build on our success, so I think we'll head back to MH on Tuesday. We'll have to clear it ourselves, but Nitnoid assures me it's easy now. OotC had cleared up to Archi in 2.5 hrs Sat night, did a few Archi pulls and then called their raid. And then gave us their raid id to go learn the battle since they're doing BT the rest of the week.

The rest of the weekend, I spent mucking about in the achievement lists. For personal amusement, I went and collected halloween candy from every town. I also got in a handful of heroic runs to work towards the Outland Dungeon Hero achievement. I was explaining the system to my 12yo son and he got really into it. I suggested he do achievements on his druid, but he wanted to play Beros, so I put up the tag and he ran around exploring every zone in the world.

As a curious aside, he told me that he liked getting achievments but in particular liked getting achievements that didn't involve having to kill lots of things. I have also occasionally thought that it's sort of peculiar how many parts of the game (esp questing) involving going to an area and genocidally exterminating the mob population. Mostly we put that out of our minds, but in a virtual reality game where some of the NPCs have stories about their virtual lives, I'm not entirely surprised that the murderousness of it pops to mind now and then. There are days where I think you could build an MMORPG with less pve killing in it (e.g., more like 1 mob per quest tops). I wonder if it'd end up being a lot less popular, though.

Pvp killing seems fine in comparison, fwiw. There you know it's mostly movement control -- you just make the other guys respawn at the GY. For comparison, yesterday afternoon my 12yo and my 5yo got on Beros and Wathirlin and ran around Shattrath infecting people with plague zombie disease. That didn't seem to bother either of them, they seemed to be having a blast, heh.

Whatever, he can explore and/or maybe do fishing or cooking achievements for me if he'd like to. Hopefully people won't think I'm ignoring them since he doesn't answer tells (the DND flag should help). Myself, I did the murderous rampage thing in Netherstorm for a bit late last night to grind some Consortium rep (via Zaxxis badges). I actually find myself looking at a wider range of possible achievements than I had originally considered. There's the 3 non-city rep: Consortium, Sporeggar and Kurenai, the 5 city reps, I'm a handful of quests short of the Lore accomplishments in the Outland regions. And there are a lot of heroic dungeons I need to redo. Sometimes, I think about going back to the old world dungeons too. I'm going to run out of time before the expansion, so I should probably pick a few things to focus on. I doubt I'll be thinking about achievements again for awhile after the expansion releases.

Tonight would be a good night for heroics, I think. Maybe the CoT ones.