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Ding dong, the night elf/demon/insert here is dead

Posted by: Tatertot » Tue May 13, 2008 1:15 pm

Illidan down!

And so it came to be that Quartz, in all its glorious slackness ventured into BT to kill Illidan. We were not prepared - but let's face it, we never are.

All I can say is, this was the encounter we've thought about since TBC launched, and it was quite a ride.

There were some minor mistakes, like the tank switching to zerker stance and a two-hander at 5% (word to the wise, be careful where you place your macros), but no first Quartz kill has ever been normal.

Quartz 1, Illidan 0. Well technically more like Quartz 1, Illidan 250 but who's counting, really?


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Zooooooooooooom

Posted by: Tatertot » Wed Apr 09, 2008 2:36 pm

Momomomonsterkill! 3 bosses in 9 days!

Tater is slack on updating the front page as usual so I, Miniboss, bring you the news while he works on some thesis or another. Quartz was in a minor slump, progress didn't happen for a couple of weeks, hots left us and she is truly missed. But what an extended week we have had, changed thursday raid to tuesday raid and there was much rejoicing. RoS was aoe healed to death, Mother went down like Gets mum on Lvaz hotdog and the council proved to be a chaos that needed some order.

Now awaits the big one, Illidan Stormrage himself, I can't wait, this is what I play for. Learning complex new encounters. Screw loot and farm raids, progression is where the fun lies. Unfortunately I can't help but see a cloud on the horizon, Brutallus is just 2 bosses away now and by all accounts we'll have to do 2 months of farming of MH/BT + Kalecgos and half the guild becoming leather workers before he can be killed. For now however, we have a crazed night elf to show who is (Mini)Boss!

(Real updates will come soon, lifetapboss is a nub - Tater)


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Sticks and stones - Bloodboil and Gorefiend

Posted by: Tatertot » Mon Mar 10, 2008 1:31 pm

As we delve deeper into the recesses of the Black Temple, the bosses get meaner. At least their names do. Gurtogg Bloodboil and Teron Gorefiend sure sound like they could oneshot the raid, but fortunately the learning curve isn't all that steep. Teron is arguably the easier boss of the two, with the only real hard part being the contruct killing. That part of the encounter is quite enjoyable though, and I appreciated seeing some open air again. Blizzard has obviously put a lot of time into the design of BT, and as much as I've grown tired of damp dark dungeons with low ceilings, so far I haven't felt that mindnumbing 'we're never getting out of this place and this trash will never ever end' feeling you used to get somewhere after Firemaw.

Speaking of trash, I know I've said this before, the BT trash seems almost casual at times. The packs aren't insanely difficult, the amount is well within the limits of what you can tolerate without completely losing focus and the constant epic drops (including gems) makes you feel like you're not just killing time for Blizzard's amusement.

Gurtogg, as an encounter, seems more complex than it truly is. After being able to wipe the raid completely on Archi, Najentus and Teron, Gurtogg is a 'classic' tank/heal fight where dps just spams their abilities and prays no one dies. A single error won't lead to a wipe but speaking from a raid leader's perspective it's irritating to wipe without anything going wrong. It's a sad day in Quartz when we can't even blame a rogue for a wipe. You can try your hardest and still just have someone die to fel rage, then get your tank killed and that'll be the end of it. The corpse run isn't bad though, and the waterfalls on the side quickly wash away the blood of the previous deaths. And with Gurtogg old-school healed and tanked to death we can focus on the best encounter in BT - Reliquary. A whole room to AE on every try - who could ask for more?


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Fly fatboy fly

Posted by: Tatertot » Tue Feb 19, 2008 12:18 pm

Image

Beforehand we read Archimonde was the ultimate retard check. Some guides suggested using 23 or 24 people rather than taking people who can't avoid a huge burning patch or who find it difficult to click on an item at the right time. Sadly, this is Quartz - if we raided without retards it would be a small raid indeed. The 'can't make a single mistake' bosses are bad enough, but when I found out this encounter also included no AE whatsoever, I was tempted to just cancel trying Archi altogether.

But the masses disagreed and off we went, to trashless wipes and lots of moron moments from everyone in the raid - from chestard ninja pulls to featherless tatertots - from nite forgetting how to stance dance after too much cider to azgard and his disconnecting to landi getting the MT airbursted - I can honestly say our wipes brought back fond Vael memories to me.

Archi is one of those fights that is extremely simple, with very little explanation or strategizing needed - all it takes is flawless execution. In absence of that, 2 min pvp trinkets and tremor totems also work. Thank god.


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A speed run bearly made

Posted by: Tatertot » Wed Feb 06, 2008 5:11 pm

It was a Tuesday, like any other Tuesday. Except we had a Zul'Aman speed run planned. About 30 min after the planned start time we can finally get started. Everyone gets buffed up, flasked up and eat some food. We bang the gong! kill the first waves of trolls. We rushed up to the Gauntlet! A great battle commenced... and then we wiped even before the first boss. Okay maybe not this week.

So yesterday we came back to the troll city of Zul'Aman, we slightly altered the setup adding another shaman for a 3rd Bloodlust. So we buffed up again, banged the gong killed the first waves of trolls and headed to the Gauntlet! After 3 minutes and much more controlled run through the Gauntlet we approached the first boss, with Sairud dying of course. As we walked up the stairs you heard Nitewalker say on Teamspeak "We gotta be faster guys!". A few minutes later Akil'zon bit the dust. Every one mounted up and rushed towards Nalorakk, the Bear Avatar. He didn't offer a whole lot of resistance and got killed quiet quickly. Only thing that is actually worth noting is that Svettleif' taunts didn't get resisted for once and Nitewalker didn't end up tanking both phases.
After that we went off to the Dragonhawk Avatar, Jan'alai. This part of the run can cost you the most time if you do it wrong, one scout can easily mean a minute of extra on the trash. But we went through it perfectly. Every scout got spotted and killed well before they reached the dreaded drums. The boss itself was no real problem with a protection paladin and three Fire Elementals (ow and a mage but let's focus on the real classes here). After Jan'alai died we had 16 minutes left on the clock, which should be plenty of time to get to and kill Halazzi, the Lynx Avatar. So we started on the trash. First few packs where no problem then suddenly two crocs went for our shadow priest Mycharson. We rezzed him moved to the next pack of hidden lynxes but for some reason they found Phaedre drinking more threatening than Svett Consecrating so they went for Phae instead, killed him in two hits. While we where rezzing the next pack was pulled and the rez got interrupted and we had to do another pack without our beloved mana biscuit maker. We saw the counter going down and down. Teamspeak got pretty heated with phrases like "Pull faster" the only one who was able to remain calm was little old me. In the last pull before the boss Mootae died and with only 4 minutes on the clock it was really getting exciting. You could feel the tension in the air. People wanted to go on but we had to rez him. With half the raid at 75% mana we engaged the boss. Now the entire run we have had a bloodlust rotation of Darigaaz -> Sairud -> Getspmak. But Sairud couldn't control it any longer and he had to pop his! Only problem is that it was about at the same time I did mine losing one bloodlust so close to failing. We focused and tried burning down the boss as fast as we could. With the clock on one minute we were still burning down the last split phase. About now sweat began to drip from everywhere. Timer running out, Halazzi's health dropping. Which one would zero first! Then we went down a great roar went over Teamspeak. I immediately rescued the little gnome from his cage. About 10 seconds later I hear Nitewalker saying "Euhm we didn't make it? I don't see the gnome anywhere" followed by me opening the sack with the bear.

They all decided to let me have the first mount that dropped, thanks allot guys!

I would like to really thank everyone who was there for this run: Nitewalker, Svettleif, Thorny, Lvazquez, Getspmak, Mootae, Mycharson, Phaedre and Sairud, hell even Yozhno for being there last week.
Some special thanks to Thorny for helping out with the group setups.


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 Quartz
Quartz is a World of Warcraft guild on the European Azjol-Nerub server.

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