Yashima Plays

So what have I been up to in the game? Besides PUGs there were a few things … the guild is doing good! We had a couple of additions both old time players from our server coming back. Our server was also the target of free transfers and at least on Alliance side it looks like a couple of raiding guilds transferred over just when others left. So maybe the influx of new players will bring a little life to the server ‘community’ (yes /2 is always very lively and we do win Wintergrasp …). One of the new guilds already organized a nice city raid which yielded me a Black Bear. There were also some loot dramz on /2 involving the same guild but apologies were issued and all seems nice so far.

I am slowly working my way through the reputations. In Wrath I am only missing the Frenzyheart and the new raiding faction. In Burning Crusade I am on my last 2 days of “Ramparts final 2 bosses & some trash for 1000 rep” for Honor Hold which is the last faction I will do in Outland – the left-overs are the Scryers and 2 higher-tiered raiding factions. After Honor Hold I will farm some more on the Timbermaw which should bring me to 35 exalted reputations. I think I am not going to 40 just yet – though I have some ideas how to get there

The other achievements I am currently “farming” are the Glory of the Hero dungeon achievements for the fast mount. We are doing quite well (several guildies have joined me in the effort, though we play with ever changing groups).

So yesterday we finally did “Less Rabi”. I think this is one of the harder achievements out there. While there are tons of comments on Wowhead and the web, I want to do a quick write up of all that I found out about the encounter.

For the achievement you need to defeat Moorabi in heroic mode without him transforming into a huge mammut. So when does this happen?

1. The transform has a cast time that scales down with his hitpoints and starts at about 4 seconds at a 100% life. At 50% he is at 2 seconds. The last cast that you will be able to interrupt with any surety is at 30% beyond that it’s just luck
2. The cooldown of this transform ability also scales down with hitpoints. The cooldown seems to start at 10 seconds. Below 50% the cooldown is between 4 and 6 seconds.
3. The boss is immune against stuns, silences and casting slows like Curse of Tongues.
4. The cast can be interrupted by the following skills: “Hammer of Justice (Pala), Mind Freeze (DK), Spell Lock (Felhunter), Counterspell (Mage), Kick (Rogue), Shield Bash (Warrior), Pummel (?), Windshear (Shaman), Maim (Feral), Silencing Shot(Hunter). The list may not be complete.
5. The cast is announced as boss emote and interrupting right then should be fine unless you have horrible lag

So from this information you must derive your tactic. Here’s what we did:

• go to the back entrance because you need to kill only 10 trash mobs or so before the boss.
• bring no healer just 4 dps, 1 tank and 2 interrupts
• remember to reset the encounter – quickly stop dps! – if he transforms
• we had just over 20k dps in the group I think
• assign the interrupts for example: mage counterspells the first and druid maims on the second
• the mage interrupts the first cast as late as possible while the rest of the group keeps dpsing
• the druid concentrates on the second cast which is harder to interrupt (and since I am horrible dps anyway it was much more important to hit the Maim button on time)
• don’t dps too hard before 50%, you need to really burn him down fast beyond that! Use your cooldowns then
• try 2 times like we did – I even survived the first try by dashing out of the instance – and get the achievement on the second
• (forget that you tried this with 2 different groups before and thought it was impossible)

Notes: Using a felhunter to automatically interrupt is a nice idea. Except, that he will interrupt the first cast the boss does, whatever it is. Since you would want to use him on a later interrupt – the first is so easy and should be done by a player – you would have to turn on auto-casting on the spell-lock after the first cast. It does seem like all 3 warlocks I saw try this, failed in this endeavour. Maybe a macro would help here.

I can’t think of any other hints … I am just glad it worked out, since I do not have the time to keep trying this every evening or so. The reset of the encounter is definitely hard because if he transforms at very low life it is possible you just kill him without any chance of a reset.

After this we decided to keep going and also do the “Share the Love“. This achievement was much easier – much less luck involved. Here’s the details:

• You need to wait to kill the boss until he has “Impaled” all party members.
• Impale seems to go to a random member of the group which is not on top of the aggro list.
• Impale is announced as boss emote for ease of keeping track
• one group member said the achievement fails if anybody dies, so do not let anybody die!
• impale does quite a lot of damage on the impaled target, be prepared to heal a lot, bring healthstones or use cooldowns etc.
• You need a good healer able to concentrate and heal for quite some time, two tanks and patience.
• The first tank simply tanks the boss, the healer heals and the rest of the group watches.
• The boss will start impaling party members, he may impale the same person over and over and over, be patient.
• once the second tank is impaled he taunts the boss off the first tank
• keep going until everyone has been impaled, then burn down the boss

Notes: we actually needed 3 tries. The boss as well as the impale sometimes does a huge burst of damage and on the first try it seems the healer (paladin) was not quite prepared for that. On the 2nd try it was just bad luck that the boss kind of one shotted the mage during impale (15k damage is a little much). The third try went smoother still the amount of damage dished out is quite insane and the healer has a lot of work to do in this encounter. The healer and the mage are fully raid equipped … but in this setup nothing matters except the tanks and the healer.

So two nice achievements in one go!

Only 5 more to go for me until I get glory of the hero. Maybe these days I’ll find the time to write up how we did a couple of the other non-trivial achievements.