Heroic Scenarios coming in 5.3!

I dread the moments running through my daily scenario. It typically is quick and easy now that Elk is running in 490+ gear. Only when we have someone who's never ran the specific scenario is there typically any chance of a wipe (typically due to over pulling). So when I was reading through the PTR notes, I got excited AND disappointed:

• Heroic Scenarios
  

  • A heroic difficulty for Scenarios have been added and are designed to provide challenging content for small groups of well-seasoned adventurers. Completing a Heroic Scenario awards Valor points, and a chance to obtain Raid Finder quality items.
  • Heroic scenarios require a pre-made group to join.
  • Heroic scenarios offer bonus objectives that will reward additional valor if completed.
    

    • An option to run a random heroic scenario has been added as a drop-down in the scenario tab in Dungeon Finder.
  • Players can complete a normal or heroic scenario for bonus valor each day, but not both.
  • Six heroic scenarios will be available in patch 5.3. Four are new and two are upgrades of existing normal scenarios.
    

    • Battle on the High Seas
    • Blood in the Snow
    • Dark Heart of Pandaria
    • The Secrets of Ragefire
    • Crypt of Forgotten Kings
    • A Brewing Storm

Yeah, 502 iLevel gear from a scenario! Boo requires a 'pre-made' group. I guess my best bet is to run a regular scenario, then re-queue for a heroic scenario.

Another interesting scenario change is the option to run cross-faction scenarios.

• Lorewalker Cho will allow heroes to take part in either faction's scenarios, so players can see what the other side has been up to.

I've always been curious if an alliance character is driving Big Bessa. (Oh, NM, it looks like Alliance are sweeping up after the Horde's attack).

Where are you hiding Scout Captain Elisa?

Yes, Elk is doing his dailies. Surprised? I really want the rep with the Sunreaver's so that I can get the commendation. That way when my priest opens the area up, she'll earn rep a lot faster!

So, we're trying to turn in Compy Stomp to Scout Captain Elisa. I met her at the entrance to the zone unhidden, now she's hiding somewhere under a shield of invisibility. Unfortunately I can stand on top of her ? but no zone, no silence, nothing.

This video has made me realize that maybe it's bugged. Watch closely at the beginning, or fast forward to roughly 10minutes 10 seconds. The player runs in and out of the cover. It's absolutely, plainly visible in the video. I stood there last night a few times and nothing.. Tag support? Or drop and re-run the quest?



Try tonight and let you know what I find...

Update: I opened a ticket last night with support. I could check on the status of that ticket now, IF I had brought my authenticator to work... So, anyway, I went and dropped all of the beast pen quests that would end under that dome. Ran back to the quest hub and started over. This time, I found her standing under a dome in a different part of the zone. She had three quests killing sentinels, including one bugger that would heal himself if not interrupted. Note, as destro, I don't have an interrupt, especially if running with a voidwalker, swapped to my observer mid fight to use his.

Update 2: Blizzard got back to me. Evidently she moves around and I simply needed to check back on the day she was working in the area. Dropping the quest line was definitely the best solution.

Oh, Never Mind

Last night I experienced my worst case of LFR fail. You know the kind you wait 10 minutes to get there, then wish you never clicked the "Accept" button!?

My first thought was "That was awfully quick!?". I typically run through a scenario then dungeon then the raid pops. Not last night. As soon as I dropped out of my scenario, I was immediately dropped into Pinnacle of Storms. Ok, sure, that's got a tough boss fight and I could see a lot of turn over.

Enter the instance and people are dying to a Thunder Lord and a Lightning Lord. If you haven't run this raid, they are the first trash you hit in the raid. People had logged off, people were leaving, people were complaining in raid chat! I went through 4 deaths, one even looked promising where we had all 25 players and made the run up the electrified stairs. Not enough healers, so we all died on the top of the stairs. It was the players saying "there's a group of us all the way at Lei Shen" (meaning they weren't helping clear trash) that I finally called it and dropped.

Once dropped, I started over on my routine. This time, I queued for Terrace of Endless Spring. Again the raid is dying to the trash. This time it's the corrupted elementals that disappear when attacked. Yeah, they were right at the landing zone for the raid. :-\ Happily we all died or teleported out and they reset. Drop back in and cleared the entire raid with no more raid wipes! At least I got one more token for the Black Prince quests and a nice shiny belt. Only 300g in the hole.. Gems and buckle later, I am broke!

Have you done much PVP in MoP?

Last expansion, I loved PVP. I was the healer in a 3-man arena group, the Backpedaling Clickers. We weren't that bad. If I remember correctly, last season we reached around 1800 area rating. Our worst problem, I am west coast and the two pallys are east coast. I'd just be getting home from work, when they were headed to bed. This expansion, with DPS so easy to get into a dungeon, my priest is still sitting in mostly PVE gear. I'd rather have the easy job of blowing stuff up instead of having to deal with keeping the DPS alive.


So, how is PVP this expansion? I see Blizzard is bringing out 2 new PVP instances with the 5.3 expansion. Fun? Not worth it? Need more discipline healers!?

Elk Heart Bad Robot Pet!

Blizzard announced last Friday (19th) a new pet coming in a 'future' expansion. This awesome little robot will be an engineering pattern so start collecting your mats engineers. I see futures in the robot market.

Question, is he going to be child-sized, like the argent crusade helper or smaller like the Lil Smoky? Personally, I am hoping more child like.

(Note: Blogger doesn't like <3 in the title, so it may caused some odd cross posts.)

Tagging Phased Major Nanners

Major Nanners is a rare spawn elite that sits on the border between the Valley of Four Winds and

Kun Lai Summit. He sits on the edge of a pond and would disappear when I got close to the pond (still haven't done many quests in area.) . I tried a number of times to agro him using my FelGuard, but couldn't keep him hooked. Nanners also has 3 corporals standing next to him and you can easily drag a few along when you get him.

Nanners can be seen down in chat window.

I found that if I sent my voidwalker to the edge of the cliff. I could then (CTRL+1) tell him to attack Nanners. Let him agro, then tell him to return to me. When he was within spell range, tell my voidwalker to attack and keep him at a distance. We made 2 attempts, first time Nanners brough along one more, we killed the corporal, but not Nanners before he killed us. Run back to corpse, avoid giant bananarang and successfully kill him! Sadly, nothing fun dropped off him.

Video

On the Hunt for Green Fire (no spoilers)

Last night Elk officially started his hunt for green fire. Unlike Amijade, I didn't suffer the RNG gods, running around Thunder Island for weeks hoping the Tome drops. Instead (lucky me), the tome dropped on the auction house for an absolute steal of 1300g. 30 seconds to swap to my auction house toon, transfer 500g over, and it was all MINE! Woot!

Impressions so far.

Sneaking through the
laser security system

1. Nice bit of lore. The reading (and it's copious) uncovers some of the behind the scenes to how warlocks got our MoP spell improvements. 
2. Class specific. This quest line has me using warlock spells that I haven't used since the novelty ran out. I just ran through a maze of traps using my all seeing eye.  
3. It's not easy. When I ran through the Battered Hilt quest chain, it was rather easy. I am at the first big 'boss' fight and have died officially 3 times. There MUST be some warlock spell I need to cast on this dude to kill him off. I am thinking teleport out of AOE range.. :) 

Well, I'll let you know when the (now) destro 'lock has some green fire, but I don't think it will be soon. Reports of needing 500+ gear score may be a problem. 

Elk is on FIRE!

Last night, I decided to swap to my destro spec and try it out again. I played a full gamut,  (i.e. scenario -> dungeon -> LFR - Thunder) and was quite surprised by a few things.

First off, because of soul leech and chaotic energy, I was seldom below 80% health or 50% mana at any time. Sure, I tried soul leech on my demo spec, but I so seldom cast Fel Flame or Soul Fire (once per rotation). During the LFR, I would end most fights with full health and full mana. I hadn't reforged for Destro yet, so maybe my Demo gear was heavy spirit loaded?

Second the rotation was a lot easier. Demo is all about watching the cool downs. Wild Imps is off CD, fire it off. Corruption is about to drop, recast. Destro for the most part, felt like I was spamming Incinerate until I could cast a Chaos Bolt.

It went something like:

• CoE
• Immolate
• Conflag
• Inc, Inc, Inc
• Conflag
• Inc, Inc, Inc
• Fel Flame (refreshes immolate)
• DS: Instability (as I should have 4 embers by now)
• Chaos Bolt, Chaos Bolt, Chaos Bolt

Without respecing into Crit, I was seeing some of these CB hit for 200k+ damage. Very nice. I am curious what I'll see now that I have removed most my mastery and enchanted/reforged for crit.

It's going to take some finger retraining (quit spamming #5 previously shadow bolt, now fel flame), but I am liking destro again. On one boss, I had the #7 damage slot. IMHO, not bad considering I am about a gear tier behind most of the top LFR raiders last night.

Horridon the Horrible

Horridon is the second boss in the LFR segment of "Last Stand of the Zandalari". You know, the giant triceratops boss, that opens doors to waiting (?) trolls who attack you mercilessly. I attempted this boss three time the other night on the LFR and was saddened to find complete failure all three attempts.

I had watched this prep video and found the lack of actual game play nice because it simplified the raid to pure mechanics. Jin'rokh was fairly easy. I think we had only one death. The trash before Horridon was interesting with the wind mechanic, making the run a bit of an obstacle course.  I believe based on raid chat, our issue with Horridon was one of our healers was on /follow.



Happily, I am almost Friendly with the Shado-Pan Assault. After I finally down Horridon, I should be able to pickup some shiny i522 bracers, a new ring and a trinket; just need another 4000 valor. :] Haven't been in this situation for awhile.

Closing in on DO Revered

Last night after running my scenario-dungeon-raid run, I decided to work on opening the Shado Pan areas. (There's a rare that npcscan keeps finding in the area bordering HalfHill that I can't kill because of phasing). Along the way, I picked up a quest that granted me (combined) about 600 Dominance Offense rep. Looking at WowHead, I see there are 44 non-daily quests that grant DO rep.

There are some interesting quest lines hidden here under the "Pandaren Campaign" catergory. For example, there appears to be a defunct series of quest that involve finding Thrall. The comments all are listed as "Out of Date", so I am wondering if this quest line even exists in production? If not, maybe it will be used to further the 5.3 story-line?

Update: OR, I just needed to go back to the Dominance Offense front and find it. Picked it up, found Thrall in the Orc starting area and then slaughtered a ton of Kor'koran.