Gramme

Yay! Wraith Blade is MINE! A Draenor server first too, apparently. Nicely over +610 spell damage now, and I've reached the +16% to hit with spells 'cap' too. Not bad for my first raid back after a two week holiday in the sun...

*BITES LIP* I'm not sure whether your post is a dig at me or a dig at your guild's mages... :winkold:

The last time I saw her was in that Sun article years ago exposing Dwight Yorke and Mark Bosnich as cross-dressing fetishists. You could tell it was her from the tattoo of Thrall on her left buttock.

There's absolutely nothing worthwhile in the arcane tree to reduce threat - not since the mage revamp in 1.10. Arcane Missiles is a dead spell nowadays - massive mana cost for no other real comparative benefit. Taking 2 points in Arcane Subtlety is kind of a no-brainer, but totally just as a stepping stone to Arcane Concentration. Frost Channeling and/or Burning Soul are what you need for threat reduction with decent efficiency. The 3-piece Netherwind bonus is good too, particularly for a scorch build - it reduces 100 damage worth of threat from every spell cast. The arcane tree is all about the mana regen. Mage aggro doesn't really happen these days, unless Ignite ticks start going insane... :winkold:

Realistically, if you have other mages in your regular raid group with Winter's Chill, then there's no need for you to sink points there. Once the debuff is applied to a mob, it works for everyone using frost spells against the mob. I think I'm the only one in Chimaera who has Winter's Chill, but since I probably attend 95%+ of all raids, all the other frost mages can feel pretty sure they'll get the benefit. With Nefarian looming large on your horizon, I would recommend thinking about sinking your points into frostbite, permafrost and improved blizzard. The big stumbling block for Nefarian is phase 1 - once you've got that sorted, a kill isn't far behind. But you need to be all over the drakonid spawns, and *everything* helps in keeping them pinned down. Our raid is quite mage-heavy, and all 7 or 8 of us respecced improved blizzard to give us that extra edge. It worked a treat. After a couple of kills, we all felt comfortable enough with the encounter to resort to our previous specs. If you do decide to take Winter's Chill, I strongly recommend that you max out to 5/5. I find, with 4/5, that the debuff doesn't stick quite as much as it should (80%, lawl) and will be dropping a point from 3/3 improved CoC to get 5/5 Winter's Chill once I get back from holiday. If PvP isn't a consideration, then the Arcane Tree is still worth thinking about - something like 29/0/22, if you have enough +hit gear. Which you might not, yet... so go for this instead. The mana regen talents are very sweet, as is Arcane Instability on top of someone else's Winter's Chill. Naxxramas is so heavy on the mana it's unreal... for the first boss, I'll use all 4 mana gems, a major mana potion and 2 evocations. But that's a few weeks away for you guys yet! Decisions, decisions... :winkold:

Hmm, thought I'd posted my profile before, but here goes again! The only remaining weakness is my sword/offhand combo - we've killed Nefarian every week since the beginning of May and still not had the Staff Of The Shadow Flame drop for us. I have the most DKP in the guild at the minute, so can basically grab whatever takes my fancy - which will likely be the Brimstone Staff or Wraith Blade depending on how we get on with Maexxna and Loatheb.

Draenor server first - Heigan The Unclean is teh dead! Picture here! A *very* fun fight...

I think the hiding thing was nerfed fairly recently, so WowWiki might be out of date. As for iceblock, it's a must-have for guilds learning phase 2 to counter-act the mage 'class call'; instead of polymorphing everyone nearby, iceblock will instantly remove the debuff which lets you get on with the important tasks of DPS and - in particular - decursing the main tank. You shouldn't waste it to avoid the shadow flame. I think the game is quite well structured in that you're very unlikely to be facing Nefarian without having Onyxia on farm (and therefore having an abundance of cloaks).

Makes no difference. The Nef shadow flame takes no account of LoS or range, as I said above. His shadow flame directly is kinda girly, but the DoT will kill you if you don't have the cloak. Also, employing the 'hide behind the throne' strategy is totally impractical considering the way the raid needs to spread in phase 1.

Everyone needs it on Nefarian - not having the cloak means instant death at the start of the second phase since Nefarian shadow flames the entire raid regardless of line-of-sight, range or whatever. Having the cloak mitigates the damage to around 600-1000 per person - easily healed. The cloaks actually aren't necessary for everyone against the three drakes - only the tanks absolutely *need* them, and they're useful for the melee DPS too.

Big congrats on Vael - it's such a massive relief when he goes down. There might be another couple of frustrating nights with him still to come - the BA is a bitch - but you're on a nice loot streak now. Did you take a look at the suppression rooms yet? It's a pretty daunting sight the first time you arrive there. One alcove at a time, drink whenever you can, don't hang around to enjoy the scenery! We had some drama in Naxxramas on Wednesday night. We one-shotted Anub'Rekhan, Faerlina and went on to Razuvious. We absolutely destroyed him on our first try, but within three seconds of him hitting the floor, the entire raid got disconnected from server. When we logged back in his corpse had vanished - no loot, no gold, nothing. Our guild leader filed a ticket but heard nothing back, despite staying up 'til 4am. Fast forward to last night... we took down our first 'world dragon' (Emeriss) then resumed in Naxx. We (miraculously!) one-shotted Noth - no-one could quite believe it - and set about looting. At this point a GM paged our guild leader regarding the events of the previous evening. In a shocking display of quality customer service, the GM informed us that he'd checked the records and found that the details of our ticket were correct. He then proceeded to dish out the missing loot to the relevant parties. So now we have 3 tanks in 3/9 tier 3 and are starting to cast lustful glances at Patchwerk. The Patchwerk fight should be fun, I think. He has 4 million hit points and you *must* kill him in 7 minutes or he enrages and destroys everyone. If you assume that the raid has 15 healers and 3 tanks, you have (obviously) 22 damage dealers to take him down... which works out as an average of about 450 DPS each for the duration of the fight. That's some scary-ass maths, I reckon. Oh, and he hits warriors with 'Hateful Strike' for 6500-9500 a time. Still no joy with Heigan though - but his time is up on Monday. And I'm rambling now... :oops:

Congrats on the new bits of Arcanist - how many pieces do you have now? Have you guys killed Ragnaros before? What's your strategy for dealing with the Sons? Kinda interested to hear since everyone seems to do it differently. A 1% wipe is horrible though - we had our fair share of those on Vaelastrasz before we finally killed him... with a warlock DoT and 1 person still alive!

Holy shit... We killed Noth again this evening (picked up the tier 3 mage belt - hurrah!) then tried to move on to Heigan The Unclean. He lives at the other end of a tunnel containing Trash Mobs From Hell... maggots, bats and 'Plague Beasts' - poison-spitting, charging, screeching, ass-kicking pack-hunting 61 elite muh-fuhs - on a 30-second respawn from when you kill them. We tried a variety of techniques... pet-kiting, AoEing, getting-nekkid-and-sprinting etc etc. We made it to the boss room once, had a crack at him and got to 86%. Not too bad for a first try. Since you can't rezz in his room, you need to 'run the gauntlet' all over again to make another try. But I think we've cracked the trash now, and may well have another go tomorrow. The boss doesn't have much health, but the encounter is a bit like playing Frogger on acid while trying to do mad crazy DPS. More news from the front-line as and when... :winkold: (Unless you want me to avoid spoilers, that is...)

I guess you meant tier 2? Anyway, my major money-spinner is enchanting. I can pull in 100g a week on that with sporadic advertising - the biggest problem is dealing with idiots who refuse to find out required mats and just pester with stupid questions. I have a few enchants from MC and some from AQ which make nice money - 20g for a button press on +30 healing on gloves is easy. A wipe-free BWL clear is comfortably a 40g profit too. BWL is good in that you don't really need many consumables - the only potion I can think of that we still use is Limited Invulnerability for the AoE classes at phase 3 on Nefarian. Otherwise it's pretty cheap to farm. Vaelastrasz is a massive cockblock... once you get him under control it's nice and easy up to Chromaggus. Positioning is the key for Firemaw/Ebonroc/Flamegor, and as long as no-one does anything silly with the aggro on Broodlord he's free epics too.

I'm not really the person to ask about that - I've played on Draenor since I started. I have a level 25 alt on Ravenholdt RP-PVP, but so far I've only actually *seen* two Alliance characters - it's a pretty new/quiet server. I will PvP from time to time (in battlegrounds), but it's definitely the PvE I enjoy - so Draenor suits me fine.

I think part of the problem may be that you have too many people to keep happy. Given that you'll pick up a finite amount of loot in any given week, to make real progress you have to ensure that the loot goes to a concentrated (i.e. 40-60) group of people. To a certain extent you have to be ruthless - it saves having to waste time explaining encounters repeatedly, and stops key items going to those who don't turn up regularly enough to benefit the raid group. - Tank loot should be concentrated on 3-4 people regardless of DKP or whatever. - Guild numbers should be trimmed down to regular raid attendees. - Raiding hours should be set (e.g. 6pm to 11pm or whatever) so that those attending know what is expected of them when they join the group. I'm guessing these things are not news, but they're worth emphasising. I've seen guilds get too bloated and implode under the weight of unhappy people, or lose momentum by being undergeared for the encounters they tackle. It shouldn't happen though. I think we have 140 characters in our guild, but at least half of those are alts. We have a raiding 'hardcore' of about 45-50 and another 15-20 who fill in the gaps when we need them. With respect to your BWL raids being short of numbers... do you fill up for MC? I'm guessing some people don't like wiping/paying repair bills. Perhaps altering your DKP rules would help? More points for attending BWL, or only allowing BWL loot to those with over x% attendance? Might help to focus a few minds... :winkold:

Sometimes I do! But then I have the luxury of 'working' at my computer at home. And we're not that hardcore - just very well organised by our guild master. I kinda think we're punching a bit above our weight in Naxxramas - we've not yet finished AQ40 (still got Ouro, Viscidus and C'Thun to take down), but we're not doing too badly. We're the second guild on our server - the first is obviously an Alliance 'easy mode' guild - but we're catching up with them extremely quickly. I think the top guilds in the world have done 12 bosses in Naxxramas and are currently getting battered by the Four Horsemen. The jump between 4 bosses down and 12 down is massive, so we're nowhere near as good as them (yet!). To give those on Vael something to aim for... we cleared all of BWL last week - from the controller at Razorgore to Nefarian dead - in just under three hours. And we got the same old loot we always do... :roll:

Hello... Long time lurker, first time poster. Since I have nothing further to add to the conjecture, speculation and fretting over the takeover/manager etc, I thought I'd introduce myself in the WoW thread... :winkold: I play an undead mage on Draenor - this is my profile. As you can see, our guild is pretty full-on - we're going for our 5th Naxxramas boss tonight. Not sure if anyone else on here has done much in Naxx yet, but it's been an amazing experience so far. Deeply, deeply expensive... but lots of fun - one of the nights we spent learning (wiping to!) Faerlina, I reckon the guild spent about 3500g on repairs and potions etc. So it's very sweet when these new bosses go down. I've just read over the last few pages and it seems that Vaelastrasz is causing problems to some of you... perhaps I can help?