Help me suck less

[kate]

Thanks for the huge post, though in my case, Ahune is doing very bad things to my people... Partly it was because it was the first fight, and partly because I really am badly geared, comparatively, and partly because I think my reflexes are for crap on fights with any kind of movement.

Other fights that are tricky - the bloody jousting with ToC normal is kicking my ass. I can take 2 of the 3 but then something happens like - instead of my tab targeting the actual enemy, it targets their horse so for a few seconds my people don't move to attack, and in that time one of the enemy gets back on a mount and by that time my whole team is weak enough that they can then take out at least 1, then 2 people, and at that point I've lost. And it's *really* frustrating to go back because that whole bloody pageant thing has to happen first, so it winds up taking forever to try again, by which point I've decided to do something more fun, like stab my eyes with spoons.

With FoS, I can easily take out the first boss, but the Devourer just wrecks my party - we're undergeared to the point where I need to fight that guy *perfectly* and since I'm just not the fast-twitch kinda gal, any mistakes wind up with at least 1 ret dying, then another, and by that point there's not enough DPS. I can get past this to be able to queue for PoS on my tank by going the PUG route, but my rets get kicked off of teams all the time as DPS because they aren't ridiculously overgeared. Maybe if I spec them holy I can get them onto pugs to get past devourer and then farm Garfrost.

What I'm saying with this is that fights that are being labeled as "really easy" or "cakewalks" are often not for me - I have no heroics on farm (except maybe for the first boss in UK, which still takes some time to get to to the point where it's actually quicker to just farm FoS and there's more chance of a useful drop there)

With regards professions and reputation grinds:

I have enchanting & tailoring on my tank (I don't know why I picked those 2 for the tank), blacksmithing and mining on one of my rets (who I might make into a tank to get the 2 extra gem + stamina bonus from mining) , jewelcrafting & alchemy on another ret, and everyone else's professions are low enough to not matter.

Reputation-wise, my tank is exalted with Hodir, revered with AC and most others. Rets are all revered with Hodir and Ebon, right now. I'll re-check to see if I have all those lovely arcanums. In either case, I can very quickly get the rets to exalted - the dailies + farming tons of relics from HoL on normal will do it.

So an update:

On my paladin I now have the shoulders and gloves of Liadrin - bought the shoulders because they were cheap, same for gloves. Next purchase will be the sacred shield libram. I am going to re-do some gems (I think I have a couple that have some def in them, which is just silly since I'm over the raid defense requirement as is). I'll also check into the arcanums and glyphs and whatnot I have on my rets.

When I have time today, I'm going to just spam run ToC normal in pugs with my tank to a) get the whole pageantry thing waived, and b) hopefully get black heart or some other tanking gear.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Other fights that are tricky - the bloody jousting with ToC normal is kicking my ass. I can take 2 of the 3 but then something happens like - instead of my tab targeting the actual enemy, it targets their horse so for a few seconds my people don't move to attack, and in that time one of the enemy gets back on a mount and by that time my whole team is weak enough that they can then take out at least 1, then 2 people, and at that point I've lost. And it's *really* frustrating to go back because that whole bloody pageant thing has to happen first, so it winds up taking forever to try again, by which point I've decided to do something more fun, like stab my eyes with spoons.

Heh, I hear ya. The easiest way to do this from what I read is to park your alts by one of the spots where you have two horses. Then get aggro on your main and run back and forth in front of your alts. This will trample the bosses with your main and not require movement on your alts, just targeting. Worth a shot at any rate.

With FoS, I can easily take out the first boss, but the Devourer just wrecks my party.

He was a stone bitch for me, too. Just keep after him until you get past it so you can queue PoS. Should be plenty of normal runs going so you can queue normals until you finish the quests.


Regarding yours and other comments on Ahune, I'm fairly surprised you're having trouble with this. Yes, the hailstones are hard but I didn't think THAT hard. I'd record a video of how I do it but my poor laptop would die of heat exhaustion. I'll detail my strat and maybe there will be some small thing you're missing that will help breakover into success.

1. Run straight ahead toward Ahune's spawnpoint and stop about halfway between the keystone frost patch on the left and the spawn point frost patch. Stop your rets here stacked on top of each other.
2. Go click the stone with tank, then run back and stack on top of your rets facing the same way. Move everyone up to the edge of Ahune's frost patch.
3. Put up seal of light if you don't have it on already.
4. About 3 seconds after you go into combat with Ahune, pop Sacred Shield.
5. As soon as the hailstone pops, target him and start DPS. MOVE BACKWARD (Use your "ALL move backward" keybind) and keep moving backward or you'll get knocked down on top of the first spike and can't move off of it in time.
6. Hit your "Flash of Light-->Self target" keybind as needed.
7. As soon as the hailstone dies, start spamming /follow and your assist/attack macro. DO NOT USE IWT DURING THIS PHASE. Trust me.
8. Run your tank in figure 8's between the two frost patches. If you keep spamming follow and DO NOT STOP, you should never hit a spike or maybe only one ret if he melees an add and stops following. Flash of Light should easily keep you healed up from damage.
9. While you're doing figure 8's, just keep targeting adds and try to run the rets over the top of the adds or close enough to get in a swing or two in passing. This will keep SoLight healing you.
10. Also, while doing figure 8's, pop Divine Plea to keep mana topped off. Objective here is to be at full health and more than half mana when the ice core pops.
11. When the ice core pops, switch to Seal of Corruption (or whichever seal you have glyphed for dmg) and DPS the core. Use wings here.
12. When you see the message that he's about to emerge soon, start backing up out of the frost patch. This will avoid the first spike that's hard to see in the ice patch.
13. Switch to Seal of Light again and recast Sacred Shield.
14. WHen the second Hailstone appears, kill him while watching for spikes. You can generally avoid spikes by backing up with the tank in a broad circle and spamming IWT on the rets. Every 4-5 seconds, hit /follow to close up the rets to avoid the spike.
15. Once hailstone dies, switch back to SoLight and repop Divine Plea if it's fallen off.
16. Go back to figure 8's while killing adds. This phase may be more difficult to keep one ret from getting spiked if he gets pulled by one of the wind adds. Just hit your instant flash of light button and have them all cast on the one that got spiked and you should be good.
17. Keep doing figure 8's and wait for the core to pop. You should have enough DPS even in trashy gear to kill the core the second time around.

There are a few assumptions to the above that helps tremendously:

• You have keybinds for "move all toons backward/forward/left/right"
• You have IWT bound to an easy key to spam while spamming follow and attack macros.
• You have flash of light bound to easy-to-reach keys for "heal everyone self-targeting" and "everyone heal toon X"
• You have your Seal of Light/Seal of <dps>" bound to easy-to-reach keybinds.
• You have your "oh shit" buttons on easy-to-reach keys. (Bubble, LoHands, etc.)

Relative to some boss fights, Ahune is not difficult but it does require you to plan your changes in seals ahead of time. Hope this helps.


Oh, and Oz, I'm running two laptops over WiFi on my brother's crappy cable right now, so I average about 190ms pings.

[OzPhoenix]

Heh, I hear ya. The easiest way to do this from what I read is to park your alts by one of the spots where you have two horses. Then get aggro on your main and run back and forth in front of your alts. This will trample the bosses with your main and not require movement on your alts, just targeting. Worth a shot at any rate.
He was a stone bitch for me, too. Just keep after him until you get past it so you can queue PoS. Should be plenty of normal runs going so you can queue normals until you finish the quests.


>>>>THE LONG BIT WHERE UGH EXPLAINED THE FIGHT<<<< Was very helpful --- Oz.


Oh, and Oz, I'm running two laptops over WiFi on my brother's crappy cable right now, so I average about 190ms pings.

Ugh.

Your children.

I will bear them.

I GOT AHUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Couldn'a done it with you matey. Thanks so much for the tips. I practically leapt outta my chair when he died (on the THIRD Phase 2.... lol).

It was ugly, I was mashin' keys I was runnin' like a chook with my heat cut off - but I don't care coz

I GOT AHUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS: Sorry Kate for hijacking this thread a bit, but...

I GOT AHUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Congrats. Sometimes, we just hit a mental block and need a quick kick-start from a different perspective to get going again. Glad it helped!

[OzPhoenix]

Congrats. Sometimes, we just hit a mental block and need a quick kick-start from a different perspective to get going again. Glad it helped!

More than anything else (and this might be of some help to Kate as well), changing the Rets off their DPS Seal to Seal of Light during the various Phase 1's made essentially all the difference. That combined with constant, circular motion, meant they rarely took a spike, and pretty much always had full health.

One Ret did die before it ended, but by the time the third Phase1 kicked in, I was sucking dry on mana, so that combined with an unlucky spike hit did him in. The other 3 rets and the prot survived. On the updside, Ahune was sitting at about only 50 or 60k when the third Phase 2 opened up.

This allowed me to complete all the Midsummer Festival events, and also got me my 50th and 51st frost badges, making me the proud owner of 5xi264 cloaks (trinkets next frost purchase).

I'd edit the over-exhuberance in my previous post, but it was written right after I downed Ahune so it's a pretty genuine reflection of the feeling of satisfaction I got from this still pretty under-geared Paladin teams success.

[kate]

Ugh.

Your children.

I will bear them.

I GOT AHUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Couldn'a done it with you matey. Thanks so much for the tips. I practically leapt outta my chair when he died (on the THIRD Phase 2.... lol).

It was ugly, I was mashin' keys I was runnin' like a chook with my heat cut off - but I don't care coz

I GOT AHUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PS: Sorry Kate for hijacking this thread a bit, but...

I GOT AHUNE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YAY!!! Stellar work - I hope to do the same once I get some time. Yesterday evening I wound up not being in the proper frame of mind for multiboxing, so I ran more PUGs (which, it turns out, have gotten SOOOOO MUCH BETTER since I'm playing as a tank, have instant queues, and if people start acting like assholes I can kick them quickly) and got my fortified clutch.

I'm gonna do what I can on Ahune and some bosses that drop things I really want, mainly because I just want to practice so I'm ready for future dungeons, but I'm not going to worry *too* much about gearing up since Cata's beta started. I figure I'll get myself the cloth chest & shoulders for my alts and their leveling.

[Nighthawk38]

Kate,

I am far from the best multi-boxer on the site, but I can assure you... it WILL get better with gear and practice. One thing I have noticed, different heroics seem to lend themselves to different playstyles. There are some heroics others say are faceroll that I just CANNOT get thru, then there are others I find extremely easy that others have a hard time with. Stick with it, and it will come.

As I said, I am by no means an expert, but if you have any questions, feel free to fire me a message and I'll be glad to help however I can.


@Oz : Congrats !!! I tried Ugh's strat yesterday on Ahune, and even though it got me a LOT farther than my previous attempts, I have yet to down that big Icy bugger. Great Work.

[jinkobi]

Kate,

I am far from the best multi-boxer on the site, but I can assure you... it WILL get better with gear and practice. One thing I have noticed, different heroics seem to lend themselves to different playstyles. There are some heroics others say are faceroll that I just CANNOT get thru, then there are others I find extremely easy that others have a hard time with. Stick with it, and it will come.

As I said, I am by no means an expert, but if you have any questions, feel free to fire me a message and I'll be glad to help however I can.


@Oz : Congrats !!! I tried Ugh's strat yesterday on Ahune, and even though it got me a LOT farther than my previous attempts, I have yet to down that big Icy bugger. Great Work.

Yep I agree and not only different playstyles but different group compositions make things easy or hard. Of course gear too- team composition means quite a bit. Like Ugh did Ahune practically naked and I think that proved a point.

Ahune was very hard for me at first... Was thinking this is going to really suck if I can't get this done since it was the last thing to get my violet proto. After 3 hours of practice the first day I now one shot it every day now. Practice practice practice!

Another thing too is don't feel rushed. Once you kill the big frost elemental the beginning of each wave you have all the time in the world. The little adds don't hit hard enough to be that big of a problem. When the Frozen Core pops go all out DPS and you'll get it over halfway most likely. Then back off when he's about to resurface and handle the next wave taking as much time as yo need. By the time the second core pops you should be able to dps it the rest of the way.

Main thing is killing the big elemental guys at the beginning of the waves. Then it's relax and handle the adds.

[kate]

Kate,

I am far from the best multi-boxer on the site, but I can assure you... it WILL get better with gear and practice. One thing I have noticed, different heroics seem to lend themselves to different playstyles. There are some heroics others say are faceroll that I just CANNOT get thru, then there are others I find extremely easy that others have a hard time with. Stick with it, and it will come.

As I said, I am by no means an expert, but if you have any questions, feel free to fire me a message and I'll be glad to help however I can.


@Oz : Congrats !!! I tried Ugh's strat yesterday on Ahune, and even though it got me a LOT farther than my previous attempts, I have yet to down that big Icy bugger. Great Work.

Thanks - I'll keep that in mind as I get my alternate teammates geared up. I'm thinking I might swap out 2 of the rets (or 3) for a shaman & priest, and if I take out 3 ret, a druid.