Blood-Queen Lana’thel

Everyone these days seems to be in love with vampires, probably primarily due to the Twilight series. Hell they even made a movie named after our guild! Even Blizzard jumped on board the vampire phenomenon with Blood-Queen Lana’thel. While the world first happened a lot faster than Professor Putricide, personally I feel this fight is significantly more challenging (and more interesting) due to the very tight enrage timer. Last night, Daybreak really pulled together and we killed Blood-Queen Lana’thel on our 2nd week of attempts, on our 24th attempt overall.

It really is quite refreshing for two reasons:

1. It’s great to see Blizzard making some seriously challenging content that not only requires a lot of coordination and execution but also has a very tight enrage timer to really push your dps
2. I am extremely happy to see Daybreak progressing with the progression curve vs behind it.

Daybreak supports Team Jacob

I haven’t really written any discussions on ICC content yet. I wasn’t really sure if these fights warranted a discussion so I guess Ill leave it up to the readers out there. If you’d like to see some chats about these fights I’ll write something up.

Pimp Your Druid: Soloing Attumen the Huntsman

I’ve taken a very long break on my Pimp Your Druid series, but Bear Pelt kindly nudged me to get back on track so I took the time to go back and do it/take some screenshots so here it is the 4th installment! This article will focus on soloing Attumen the Huntsman to obtain your very own Fiery Warhorse Reins from Karazhan. As you can imagine, the difficulty of this one is starting to ramp up in comparison to some of the other soloable bosses I’ve discussed, however it is not as difficult as you would think. Before anyone cries foul and says you need a specific spec/gear, let it be known that I did this at lv 70 in a bear spec so it is very much doable with whatever gear you have!

Prerequisite

• You must be in a raid to enter Karazhan
• You must have The Master’s Key to open the doors to Karazhan, if you do not have the key, you can start your attunement with Restless Activity
• You do not have to be lv 80 to do this however I highly recommend you be 80 and  if you aren’t, do this in a bear spec

What gear do I need?

The answer is “it depends”. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article I did this at lv 70. However I did it with full T6, full bear spec, full consumables. Naturally I wouldn’t recommend it as it is quite tricky but it is possible. Now lets assume that most people who are gunning for this are lv 80 if that is the case, it really comes down to what you feel more comfortable with. If you are a full bear spec with a half decent tanking set you probably don’t even need to kite (explained below). If you’re like me and don’t have a bear spec and only a half assed bear set, then you probably just want to get as much stam on as possible and kite once or twice. Naturally any consumables or food buffs will always be advantageous.

Getting There/Clearing Trash

• You must clear all trash on route to Attumen, if you do not clear all the trash prior to Attumen it will aggro once you pull and you’re in for a big repair bill.
• You must clear the 2 humanoid packs behind Attument in the blacksmith area as well, this is to ensure you have room to kite Attument

How to Solo Attumen the Huntsman

Lets start with a quick overview of the fight. Attumen is a multi phase fight, where at first he is on top of his mount (Midnight). Once you start dpsing and you bring him down to 95% he will dismount and you will have to deal with both Attumen and Midnight at the same time. This is the toughest part of the fight since both of them are hitting you at the same time, as such you want to get out of this phase as fast as possible. While you can dps either Attumen or Midnight, I would personally recommend you focus on Midnight as Attumen is immune to bleed effects. Once Midnight hits 25%, Attumen will remount and their HP will rise to whoever has the highest HP of the two. Once Attumen remounts, the amount of damage going around will be significantly less and becomes a lot simpler and all you have to do is burn down to 0%.

There are a few specific abilities that Attumen has that you should be aware of and watch out for:

• Shadow Cleave: Cleave attack for around 4k.
• Intangible Presence: Casts every 30 seconds a wide-area curse that reduces chance to hit with melee attacks, ranged attacks and spells by 50%.
• Berserker Charge: After Attumen is mounted, he periodically does a charge on a chosen target. This does over 6k on cloth, and causes a knockdown effect.

The hit reduction is very annoying, so make sure you do not pop Berserk when that is up. The charge however is not really a big deal because he will only charge if you are out of range which will only happen if you are kiting him. Lets get to the actual strategy now.

So as I mentioned above, make sure you clear all trash, this is very important not only because the trash packs prior will aggro once you pull (trust me I’ve tried) and also because you need room to move around behind Attumen. Here’s a screenshot of what it should look like behind Attumen once you cleared the trash packs.

Empty room for kiting purposes

Before you pull, lets look at the kiting strategy involved. Run up the stairs to where the staircase meets the wooden pole. In the screenshot above you can see it at the top of the ss near the middle. This is the point that you want to tank Attumen. The specific reason for this is because if you run into problems where you are low HP, you can jump down and heal yourself. The key here is that you want to jump to your RIGHT because Attumen will not follow you and he will run down the stairs -> through the blacksmithing area -> through his spawn point -> to get to you. This will give you about 10s to heal yourself! Once you’ve healed yourself you can then start moving him back to the staircase in case you need to kite him again.

Super ghetto paint job, You go right (green) and Attumen goes left (red) which will give you ~10s to heal yourself. Also notice the big pole in front of me, that's the tanking spot.

Sample tanking of Attumen, note I popped Berserk with the -hit debuff?

Jumping down to heal myself, notice Attumen is nowhere to be seen.

Once Attumen comes around the corner and you are in LOS he will charge you and you want to make sure you are in Bear Form by the time that happens. The last thing you want is to get caught in caster form when he comes charging at you. You can repeat this kiting strategy as many times as you need to. At 70 it took many trips around the staircase to kill him but last night it only took 1 trip so it will really depend on what gear/spec you are.

No luck today, better luck next time, can you guess what trinket I have on?

That concludes my Attumen soloing guide. Karazhan has a weekly raid timer so unfortunately you can only do this once a week.  I will admit I’ve slacked on farming mounts as of late but make sure you keep at it because you never know when it will drop! Next up on the Pimp your Druid series will be how to solo Magister’s Terrace for your very own Swift White Hawkstrider

Topics of Week #1

Emblem of Frost Collecting

3.3 has been out for approximately 7 weeks so far and if you are lucky enough to be in a guild that can clear all content and have been extremely diligent with daily heroics and weekly raids, you should currently be at 295 badges and by next week you will have acquired enough badges to purchase 4pt10! Naturally this is an ideal situation and not everyone is fortunate enough access all content or have the time to be so diligent. Personally I’m currently at  251 due to missing some dailies, and sitting in raids to allow other folks to get some time in ICC. So for me it’ll be the week after before I get 4pt10 which I assure you will be critastic!

Toravon the Ice Watcher

Next week is the start of Season 8 of the arena season which means that Toravon the Ice Watcher will be available! Traditionally, the VOA bosses have always dropped gloves and leggings, and as you know (or should know) the odd piece out for our 4pt10  is the gloves. So you should be praying to the gods that Lasherweave Legguards or Santified Lasherweave Legguards drop from Toravon 10/25 respectively. To add some general points of advice

1. If you are in a position to obtain 4pt10 next week, do VOA first and see if you get lucky
2. If you are still working on getting frost badges to purchase tier pieces, save pants for last

As always, this is only a general rule of thumb as it doesn’t take into consideration your gear set and you you should try and identify what is your biggest upgrade.

Hit and Arp Cap Decisions

Regardless if you’re in a raiding guild you should be sitting on a pretty amt of ilv 251/264 gear and you should now be facing some really tough choices. The top two questions on my mind currently are:

• Should I push for the Arp hard cap?
• How the hell am I going to hit cap myself?

Kalon did some excellent work last year outlining gear weightings for cats which is an excellent reference for what sort of gear to aim for. However if you were to take the top gear weighting per category you’d realize you would be sitting at 0 hit and about 1500 arp which is well over the arp cap. So my next post will try and address what slots we should consider sacrificing to obtain a lower weighted item that has hit. This really could come down to personal choice/preference or what is readily available to you but it’s definitely the top concern on my mind currently. Expect this post by next week.

Gear Weightings & Choices

As I mentioned yesterday, Kalon is retiring from WOW and with that we lose a great fearl resource. One of the things that Kalon was great at was working out gear weightings and identifying item choices. Luckily we still have Rawr which is a great resource but personally I don’t like to blindly follow without doing a bit of research myself. I can admit that in recent months due to Kalon’s excellent work I haven’t had to do much but it looks like it may be time to brush off a little rust in the theorycrafting department. I’d like to write a post up on how to identify and calculate these gear weightings so that we are all a bit more educated on how to do so. Again, expect this post by next week.

Blizzard News

A few weeks ago I had posted a complaint concern that ferals were being excluded from weapons that had procs. Blizzard has dashed away my dreams of any sort of weapon proc in ICC, oh well at least we have DBW. As for showing love I’ll believe it when I see a true feral legendary (No Atiesh doesn’t count!)

Q. All specs get a proc weapon from ICC25, except frost death knights and feral druids. Any plans to give these specs ICC25 proc weapons?
A. It’s tough when you get into the design mode of “everyone must be able to get something from every boss.” We try to cover a reasonable spread of players, but as with the Ashen Verdict rings and the Quel’delar, there are going to be some specs skipped over. We still love you

Progression and Achievements

Currently we are into our 3rd week of The Plagueworks and 1st week of  The Crimson Hall and it’s been a blast so far. Some of new mechanics have been pretty creative and fun. Hell, even seeing Mother Shahraz’s Fatal Attraction in reverse definitely brought back some memories. Daybreak has been picking up steam since 3,3 was released and we’ve been making some really good progress overall in ICC. Our 10 man group hit 40th worldwide kill of Blood-Queen Lana’thel on GuildOx which has us ranked World 30th currently. Our 25 man also did a fantastic job and killed Professor Putricide on our 5th try overall and we got Blood-Queen Lana’thel down to 15% in 25 man as well. Unfortunately we ran out of attempts for this week but there’s always next week.

As well, we took some time and went back to TOGC10 and knocked off Tribute to Dedicated Insanity, while the achievement/title are nice, whats even nicer is the ability to DE all of the crap old gear I’ve been holding for this! Finally, we went back to Ulduar and completely destroyed Algalon with our 3.3 gear. While I feel no pride in cheesing 3.1 content in 3.3 gear, a kill is a kill and that marks the completion of all Ulduar 3.1 content (yay).

Farewell Kalon

The immortal Alamo once said:

DURIDS IS MUST ALWAYZ HALP EECH OTHER: sumtimes a new durid is need sum halp and advise frum a good durid so u shuld alway halp unother

As most of you already know (and if you don’t shame on you!), Kalon has decided to hang up his paws and retire from wow and blogging. It truly is a sad day in the blogging world, especially for feral druids as he has been a consistent source of reliable (correct) information for a long time. The feral blogging community is very small as it is and to lose Kalon is nothing short of devastating. It’s hard to express gratitude to someone you’ve never met. However Kalon has touched many of us feral druids out there with his words of wisdom and advice. For us bloggers out there, you know how powerful a simple Kalon linkup is. Kalon’s followed up his goodbye post with some recommended reads and I would say I am quite honored to be mentioned along with some really great current and past feral bloggers so many thanks for that.

To Kalon: Best of luck to you, your newborn and the rest of your family and remember there’s always Cataclysm

Epic Flight Form + Ground Mount Bug

I’m sure I’m not the first to notice this (I did a search of this after I found this and found a bunch of posts related to this) but I thought I’d share with you all so that you can enjoy this while you can and hopefully before they fix this. (PS. PLEASE DONT FIX THIS BLIZZARD!)

To get this super fun bug working, you need to do the following:

1. Get into Flight Form
2. Enter an battleground
3. Get on your ground mount and exit the battleground
4. Once you exit you’ll be in flight form mounted to your ground mount!

Discovering the bug!

Having some fun

Chilling in Dalaran

Taking some friends for a ride

Some things to note:

• This works in any instance, battleground or dungeon but you have to be mounted as you exit
• You can use the /afk feature or wait for the battleground to end
• You can use any ground mount (see ss below!)
• Regular/Epic flight form both work
• You CAN use passenger mounts to load your friends!