Dance Dance Deathwing

Return of the Dailies

One of the constants in World of Warcraft since I believe the Burning Crusade expansion… is the construct of the daily quest.  It has taken many forms over the years, but the crux of all of them is that it is something that you will be greatly benefited by if you do it every single day.  This expansion seems to have abandoned some of the more heinous faction grind dailies, but fear not the idea is alive and well.  This time however it has taken up residence in your Garrison, with the buildings that you built dictating what kind of daily quests you get.  Many of these are daily resource gathering, and as such I have started attempting to do these every morning before I blog.  Right now with two characters it seems to take me about fifteen minutes to do all of the gathering and making sure the various work order queues are full.  By the time you extend that over all eleven of my Alliance faction characters however you are still going to take up a pretty large chunk of the day doing nothing but fiddling with bits and bobs in your garrison.

The most lucrative and I feel likely the most important daily is the one gained from the scout in your town hall.  This rewards between 800 and 1000 apexis crystals which are essentially this expansions version of “justice points”.  They can be spent on various bits of gear, which then can be upgraded through several tiers that I believe tops out at 665.  Thankfully most days there is someone asking in guild to form up a group and we go do it together.  However yesterday my timing was off completely, and as such I resorted to the open party finder.  The nice thing about the assaults on the various locations is that they can be completed in a raid, and as such this allows you to use the raid finder to get a group rather quickly.  Yesterday from the moment I finally got a group to accept me (it took several before one did) to the moment I completed the quest was about fifteen minutes or running around in a large circle at the Iron Docks pits.  Which in the grand scheme of things really is not too terrible for 1000 apexis crystals.

The Firelands

Yesterday I continued my tour of older raids, attempting to solo my way through all of the content.  Firelands is a raid that I never actually set foot in before, largely because it happened while I was gone from the game.  I quit World of Warcraft initially with the launch of Rift, and at that point my raid was working on Cho’gall in Bastion and had just downed Maloriak in Descent.  So there were two raids I never actually got to see in Cataclysm, both of which I was a little apprehensive to try and solo.  Black Temple for example I have run so many  times, including when the content was legitimate… that I know the place like the back of my hand.  These new raids I figured I would learn as I go.  To be truthful there really wasn’t much of anything in the raid that gave me issues, and like often is the case… steamrolling it often rewards you several achievements.  The most interesting of the fights was probably Beth’tilac.

I had no clue what I was doing, but apparently did things optimally as I got an achievement for never letting any of the spiders hit the ground before killing her.  I have to say I am so thankful for spammable heroic throw.  While under normal circumstances it does not deal that much damage, it does at least give me an option for ranged dps as a warrior, and I have been using it liberally while soloing this old content.  This is definitely a raid I plan on soloing weekly because not only is there some cool transmoggy bits, but also a few mounts that can drop that look extremely sweet.  Additionally killing anything in the zone gives Avengers of Hyjal rep… and Belghast has always been the character I was proudest of having some strange Exalted reps on.

The Dragon Soul

The other raid that I tackled yesterday was Dragon Soul, the end of the expansion raid and one littered with tons of lore and cinematics.  Once again I went into this raid completely fresh with no prior knowledge of it, and as such I took a few deaths here and there to things I needed to deal with.  Most of the content was really straight forward, but I hit an absolute roadblock on the Spine of Deathwing encounter.  In fact I had to actually take a  break and do some research on how to actually do that fight.  I can see why this encounter was the bane of so many raid groups, in fact I know a handful that actually broke up as a result of not being able to finish it.  That said ultimately I figured out a solid way to solo it.  For those unfamiliar with the fight when you land on his back you are on a section where 4 corruptions, these giant fiery tentacle things have spawned.  Two things happen when you take one down that are important.  Firstly a Hideous Amalgamation spawns, which will be important later… then a fiery spot appears on the ground that you can stand in to root you to Deathwing’s back as corrupted blood spawn from each of the open wounds.

The key feature of the fight is that Deathwing will try and roll you off of his back.  In order to keep this from happening you need to have a fiery tentacle buff that shows that you are tethered to his back.  When he rolls all of the Hideous Amalgamations fly off, which for the first few times is something that you want to happen…  after a bit however you are going to want to halt that process.  Ultimately what I did was stand on one side of Deathwing in a fire spot rooting me to his back until 10 blood had spawned.  You technically only need 9, but I found it worked smoother if I had a spare.  When each blood dies it spawns a fire patch on the ground… and ultimately you need to drag a Hideous Amalgamation through 9 of these until he grows in size.  So when I first land on his back I hill 3 Corruptions, leaving one up until I have gathered up the 10 bloods…  I take them out in one shot and then kite the Amalgamation through the fire until it grows… kill it next to the back plate…  which allows you to kill an exposed tendon holding it to Deathwing’s back and move on to the next section.

Dance Dance Deathwing

The challenge is to “dance” back and forth on his back so that he doesn’t actually roll all the while you are kiting and dpsing down the add.  Because if he rolls it resets the entire process knocking the amalgamation off his back.  So ultimately I would stand in the fire, collect 10 bloods… then kite over to the last corruption…  hit thunderclap which is enough damage to take out all of the bloods and the corruption.  This spawns the amalgamation and I move immediate to the other side allowing him to go through it… and keeping deathwing from rolling.  Then finally kite back while killing the Amalgamtion, let it explode and knock the plate loose.  At which point I stand in the fire again rooting me to his back, and dps down the tendon holding the plate onto the back.  After you have taken down one section the next areas go faster because you have more holes in the back.. and therefore are generating a lot more corrupted blood each round.

This step in the fight literally took me a dozen or so deaths before I got the pattern down well enough to be able to make it through the entirety of the fight without either not getting knocked off, or not allowing a fully loaded amalgamation to get knocked off.  I feel like now that I know the fight I  can pretty much repeat it whenever I need to, but in any case it was an interesting thing to learn how to solo.  For the entirety of the weekends raid running, the only fight that managed to get the best of me was Nefarian 2.0.  Even then i am thinking I might be able to do something to mitigate the insane amounts of damage I was taking.  So I have not given up on that one, because I really really want to farm up a Reclaimed Ashkandi.  I did apparently manage to get an extremely rare flying mount Experiment 12-B when I took out Ultraxion.  Given the comments from folks in guild, apparently I spent all of my good luck on getting that to drop.  Most of them never saw it the entire time they ran Dragon Soul.  In any case it was a fun weekend, I am likely going to start farming these various raids each week.