Ji-Kun is a fight of 2 halves. The platform fight and the nests fights. This is a fight with a steep learning curve and only once the nest teams have mastered their task will success occur.

The Platform Fight
On the platform Ji-Kun uses SIX abilities:
1) Infected Talons is a stacking Nature damage DoT.
2) Talon Rake applies a debuff which causes the target to take increased damage from Talon Rake for 1 minute.
3) Down Draft is a spell that Ji-Kun casts roughly every 2 minutes. It is a channeled spell that pushes all players away from Ji-Kun for 8 seconds. Players must run towards Ji-Kun to avoid being pushed back.
4) Caw is a nuke that Ji-Kun casts often which deal damage in an 8-yard radius of their point of impact.
5) Quills is a raid-wide AoE attack that Ji-Kun channels for 8 seconds roughly every one minute that deals damage to ALL players.

Feed Young
The sixth ability is Feed Young is regularly cast throughout the fight to feed the Hatchlings in the nests below. When there are no Hatchlings alive Feed Young is cast on the platform and leaves leaving a green void zone upon landing. These void zones have several characteristics.

Standing in a void zone for 3 seconds causes players to become Slimed which is a DoT and a debuff causing them to take increased damage from further applications of Slimed that is only removed when Ji-Kun dies. If a player who is flying intercepts the food thrown by Ji-Kun while it is in the air, they prevent the void zone from spawning, and they gain a stack of a 30-second buff called Primal Nutriment, which increases damage and healing done.

When Feed Young lands at the location of the Hatchlings, they begin to eat for 10 seconds and if they're still alive after this, they become more powerful adds called Fledgelings.

The Nests Fight
Below Ji-Kun's platform are 5 nests, with several unattackable and untargetable eggs. When the nest is activated, these eggs spawn 4 Hatchlings who have a single ability which causes a small amount of damage to their target. When they hatch, the Hatchlings call for food, and Ji-Kun's next Feed Young targets them. If they turn into Fledgelings, they deal much higher damage and after a while, the Fledgelings lay eggs which will spawn Juveniles.

The 3 nests above Ji-Kun's platform contain Mature Eggs of Ji-Kun. When one of these nests is activated, Juveniles will hatch out after 20 seconds. After hatching, Juveniles fly above the raid and throw balls of slime, which also leave behind void zones. The Juveniles are out of range from the platform and as the void zones act as a soft enrage, Juveniles must be prevented from hatching.
Nest Activation
When the fight starts, the north-eastern lower nest activates and every 30 seconds the until the end of the fight, a nest activates. Nests activate in a clockwise direction and sometimes, both a lower and an upper nest activates together.

The order of activation is:
00:30 -> lower nest.
01:00 -> lower nest.
01:30 -> lower nest.
02:00 -> upper nest.
02:30 -> upper nest.
03:00 -> upper nest.
03:30 -> lower nest.
04:00 -> lower nest.
04:30 -> lower + an upper nests.
05:00 -> upper nest.
05:30 -> upper nest.

This order repeats but Ji-Kun will most likely be dead or wipe the raid should it last too much longer.

Moving to Nests
To get to the lower nests you can run and jump off of Ji-Kun's platform, if you miss the nest you are carried slowly back up to the platform.

You can also fly between nests by running over a feather dropped by a hatchling when it dies and you will get a buff with 4 charges, called Daedalian Wings and an extra action button with the ability Flight. Using Flight allows you to fly (orly?) but only for 10 seconds, removes 1 charge of Daedalian Wings and you are prevented from using flight again for 15 seconds. If your Flight buff ends while you are still flying, you will not take fall damage.

You can only pick up a feather once per minute.

Strategy
Basics:

• You need 2 tanks to allow the Infected Talons and Talon Rake debuffs not to get out of control;
• You need 2 nest groups of 2 DPS and 1 healer to go to the nests and rotate them;
• Spreadout on Ji-Kun's platform to minimise damage from Caw;
• Stand as close to Ji-Kun when she is about to cast Down Draft and run towards her;
• If you have spare Flight stacks intercept as many of the balls of slime that Ji-Kun throws to prevent the Feed Pools from spawning, and  for the damge buff;
• Despawn Feed Pools on the platform by standing inside them for 3 seconds;

Nest Teams
00:30 -> lower nest -> Team 1
01:00 -> lower nest -> Team 2
01:30 -> lower nest -> Team 1.
02:00 -> upper nest -> Team 1.
02:30 -> upper nest -> Team 1.
03:00 -> upper nest -> Team 1.
03:30 -> lower nest -> Team 1.
04:00 -> lower nest -> Team 1.
04:30 -> lower -> Team 2 + an upper nests -> Team 1.
05:00 -> upper nest -> Team 1.
05:30 -> upper nest -> Team 1.

After clearing the nests, teams should return to the platform and spread out to minimise Caw damage.

Everyone be close to Ji-Kun and run towards her when she casts Down Draft and use any movement-speed-increasing abilities to help keep you on the platform. The nest teams should NOT use charges of Flight unless they have just returned from a nest.

Maximising DPS
Players with Flight should to fly up in the air when Ji-Kun casts Feed Young on her platform, and intercept balls of slime when they can as this will boost their DPS.

Heroism /Time Warp should be used towards the end of the fight as things begin to get messy.

Healing Concerns
The only healing concern is quills. The cooldown on this matches Spirit Shell perfectly and therefore a Discipline Priest is awesome during this part. If there is no discipline priest available your healers should use raid cooldowns during this phase.

Because the nest teams are also vulnerable to quills, players not on the platform when quills is cast should use personal defense cooldowns and may need emergency treatment when they finally land back on the platform. more »

OVERVIEW
Durumu the Forgotten is three-phase fight. The phases are.

1. The Normal Phase: Durumu uses his less harmful abilities during this time.
2. The Colorblind Phase: at 0:30, 3:30, 6:30 and 9:30 Durumu targets 2 raid members with a differently coloured cone of light. Each player will have to "kite" the cones around the platform until they reveal 3 invisible adds which must be killed to end the phase.
3. The Disintegration Beam/Maze Phase: at 2:30, 5:30  and 8:30 Durumu will enter the Disintegration Beam/Maze Phase where he channels a deadly beam of light in front of him and slowly rotate around the platform for 1 minute. The floor of the room is covered in extremely damaging ground effects with only a small safe zone which moves slowly around the room and makes the maze which players must stand in to survive.

Durumu: Abilities
Durumu is a turret he cannot be moved from the centre of his platform and if there is nobody in melee range, he will cast Gaze that deals raid wide damage that will eventually wipe the raid.

He has 4 main abilities that he uses during the Normal and Colorblind Phases.

• Hard Stare: a damaging attack cast on the tank that deals damage and applies two debuffs to the target;
• Serious Wound: a stacking heal reduceing debuff;
• Arterial Cut: a bleed effect that is removed when the target is healed to max HP;
• Force of Will: an conal knockback cast on a random player that effects any player standing in this cone;
• Lingering Gaze: a spell cast at 2 random raid members that deals damage in a 15-yard radius when they land and also creates a void zone. Standing in the void zone casues the player to take damage and get a slowing debuff;
• Life Drain: he summons a Hungry Eye which channels Life Drain on a random raid member for 15 seconds, dealing ever increasing damage to the victim every second, and healing Durumu for the life drained. This can be intercepted by placing themselves between the Hungry Eye and the victim which causes the Hungry Eye to drain life from the second player instead.

Colourblind Phase
After 30 seconds and then every 3 minutes Durumu enters the 2nd or "Colorblind" Phase which lasts until the raid finds and kills 3 Crimson Fogs. During this phase Durumu uses all the abilities from the 1st phase.

When the Colorblind Phase starts, three random raid members will be targeted by a red beam, a blue beam, and a yellow beam. After a few seconds, the beams turn into three differently-colored cones of light are created on the floor of Durumu's circular platform: a red cone, a blue cone, and a yellow cone.

The red and blue cones are centered around the players targeted by the red and blue beams respectively, and follow the players around as they move. The yellow cone moves around either clockwise or counter-clockwise (it is chosen randomly).

Players standing in the cones share the damage it deals and if nobody joins the targeted player inside a cone, the raid will take huge damage from that cone.

Finding the Fog Beasts
The Fog Beasts can only be found by moving the matching cloured cone of the light over them. The blue cone will find the Azure Fog, the red cone will find the Crimson Fogs and phase ends when all 3 Crimson Fogs are dead. If the cone is moved past the Fog Beast's location before it is dead, the Fog Beast will go invisible.

Once revealed, the Crimson Fog casts Caustic Spike on random raid members until it dies, the Azure Fog casts Icy Grasp which deals ever increasing damage and respawns immediately after being killed.

Maze Phase

After 2 minutes and 30 seconds Durumu will start channeling Disintegration Beam Precast for the first 8 seconds the beam is harmless and the floor of the room slowly gets covered by Eye Sores which initially cover a random circular sector representing 1/12th of the room before it expands clockwise or counter-clockwise direction (the direction is random) and covers an additional 1/12th of the room every second until the entire room is covered.

After the Eye Sores hit the Disintegration Beam, you will see two safe zones forming next to the beam. One safe zone is close to the boss and the other is further away. The Disintegration Beam will now be "armed" and instantly kill anyone it hits.

The safe zones keep moving with the beam so players simply need to move through the maze to avoid taking damage from the Disintegration Beam or the Eye Sores. Durumu also deals moderate amounts of damage to random raid members but uses no other special abilities or attacks.

Strategy
The first phase is pretty much a tank and spank. The tanks need to switch so Serious Wound does not stack too high so the healers can easily keep the tanks at full health so Arterial Cut damage is minimised.

Players should drop the void zones left behind by Lingering Gaze on the outer edge of the platform and everybody should move out of the  cones created by Force of Will which will kill them as they get knocked off the platform.
When players are targeted by Life Drain, everybody should try to interupt the beam between the player and the Hungry Eye to reduce the healing Durumu receives.

During the Colourblind Phase, the raid must reveal and kill 3 Crimson Fogs as quickly as possible, so the Colorblind Phase is over quickly.

When Durumu casts the 3 beams on the random players the locations of the 4 Fogs are shown by a circle of red/blue fog for a second or two. Someone should mark these locations especially that of the blue fog.

The raid should split evenly between the three cones to even out the damage:

• Melee should stack in the red cone;
• Healers should stack in the blue cone;
• Tanks/ranged should stack in the yellow cone;

Everybody should stand as close to Durumu as they can so the healers can have all of the raid in range.

The player targeted by the red cone must move around the platform to the locations of each Crimson Fog and stand still until it has been killed, before moving on to the next one.

The player targeted by the blue cone should move to the designated blue cone spot (unless the Azure Fog is at that location) so the Azure Fog is not revealed.

The player kiting the red cone should move the opposite direction to the yellow cone and and when moving the red cone through the blue/yellow cones do it as fast as possible to minise incoming damage. The kiter should also NEVER let the 3 beams cross at the same time as this will cause the whole raid to take huge damage.

During the maze phase, mark a player who knows how to move during this phase, and simply ask the rest of the raid to follow them.survival is the key, stand in the safe zone, do not take risks and do not panic the beam will be right up your ass most of the time DPS should be done but getting through the phase safely is more important.

Keys to Success

• Getting through the Colourblind Phase quickly by killing 3 Crimson Fogs and NOT revealing the Azure Fog;
• Surviving the Disintegration Beam Phase;

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Megaera is a hydra, and we never get to attack Megaera herself only her heads. To kill her, we need to kill 7 heads to defeat Megaera.

Megaera has three different types of heads.

• Venomous Heads(green) deal Nature damage;
• Flaming Heads (red) deal Fire damage;
• Frozen Heads (blue) deal Frost damage;

Megaera's heads can be in one of two places near the platform or at the back of the cave.

1. Near the platform: 2 heads (each of a different type) will be near the platform and can be attacked and killed, and they deal damage to the raid;
2. At the back of the cave: When one of the heads near the platform is killed, two heads of the same type will spawn at the back of the cave. These heads cannot be attacked or damaged by the raid, and will deal damage to the raid through a special ability;

When one of the two heads near the platform is killed, the remaining head submerges, and then re-emerges together with a new head. The new head will always be of a different type than the one we had just killed.

Strategy

When the fight starts, we will want to focus the raid's DPS on one of the two existing heads. Have the two tanks each pick up one of the two heads, and tank them facing away from the raid. The heads have a HUGE hit box allowing melee to spread out by being at max melee range the ranged and healers should also spread out with DPS at max range from the head while healers fill the spread out in the gap between melee and ranged.


When one head dies, the raid should stack up close to one of the heads, to allow AoE heals during the 20 seconds of Rampage. DPS should continue to nuke the head that is to be killed.

After 20 seconds, Rampage will end and we can spread out again. Tanks should switch between these two heads.

The raid will now have to dea with the special abilities cast by the heads at the back of the cave.

You MUST move away from the impact location of Acid Rain to minimise the damage taken 15-20 yards away is enough.

If you are afflicted by Cinders you MUST run to the drop zone or over any Icy Ground void zones available and then be dispelled in a safe location. DO NOT run to the sides or you will get breathed upon and take avoidable damage.

If you are chased by Torrent of Ice you MUST run from the beam of ice AWAY from the raid and IF possible, kite over any existing fiery void zones to extinguish them. DO NOT run to the sides or you will get breathed upon and take avoidable damage.

Continue DPSing the heads one at a time, while handling the mechanics cast by the heads at the back of the cave, and the increasing damage we will have to endure.

Tanking Concerns

Tanks have a relatively simple task during this fight. While Rampage is being cast, there is no task that tanks must perform, and they should continue to stack with the rest of the raid while attacking the head that is the current DPS target.

Shortly before Rampage ends, the two tanks should each go to one of the two heads, and they should prepare to start tanking them. As soon as Rampage ends, the other two heads will begin to melee and cast their frontal cone attacks.

These two tanks will need to switch the heads they are tanking each time a head dies, and during the subsequent Rampage. Tanks should be using defensive cooldowns if taking a third breaths. The head that the raid is focusing should be dead before a 4th breath ever comes.

Dealing with Back of the Cave Abilities

Acid Rain

Acid Rain is the easiest special to deal with as all you must do is move away quickly from the impact location. Certain classes can afford not to move if they use Magic damage-reducing abilities like Anti-Magic Shell or Cloak of Shadows.

Cinders

If you are afflicted by Cinders you MUST run to the drop zone or over any Icy Ground void zones available and then be dispelled in a safe location. DO NOT run to the sides or you will get breathed upon and take avoidable damage.

The damage of the Cinders DoT is quite high, healers may be forced to dispel you early to stop you dying if you slack at moving and/or spreading out this can cause wipes.

Torrent of Ice

If chased by Torrent of Ice you must run from it immediately or die. NEVER run it through other raid members, and especially not over the place where the raid is stacked. If there are any fiery void zones from Cinders that you can safely run over you should kite the beam over them to despawn them.

Kill Order

Unkilled heads get a stack of Hydra Frenzy and this means if we allow a head to go unkilled all fight it will have 220% attack speed. However with good healing we should be able to deal with that. Therefore the preferred kill order is:

Green - Red - Green - Red - Green - Red - Green - Red

This allows us to not have to deal with the most annoying special ability, Torrent of Ice.

However, if the tanks and healers are unable to deal with that we will need to kill the blue head and the kill order then becomes:

Green - Red - Green - Red - Blue - Red - Green

This will mean that we risk having a healer kiting during the most damaging times but does mean less healing on the tanks.

Healing Concerns

This is a very healing-intensive encounter which starts out with relatively low damage, but this damage continues to increase as the fight goes on.

The periods of highest raid damage are during Rampage and for best results the raid should stack up, and healing and defensive cooldowns MUST be used.

After the first Rampage, the raid may need to move while stacking, to avoid Acid Rain, and some raid members will need to move out if targeted by Cinders or Torrent of Ice.

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Primary role:Mêlée DPS
Birth Date: September 16th 2008

Mikmaq was named after small North American indian race as I had the North American indian image generated from the Tauren in mind when I created my shaman. She was initially created as an experiment in multi-boxing with her mage partner Mandak and Mikmaq was initially intended to be an elemental shaman.

However, overtime I have become a fan of enhancement and  her off-spec is healer. However because of my love of healing and the fact that there are simply too few healers in the game and, more importantly my guild I usually end up healing in raids.

A herbalist and alchemist (flask master) by trade Mikmaq has spent much of her non-levelling time out in the world herbing while waiting for instance/LFR queues to pop although in Mists that has shifted a bit towards pet battles.

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It has taken me way too long to do this but now it is here I hope you enjoy my Weak Aura import strings for priests of all specs. My thanks go to Derevka at Tales of a Priest for getting me off the starting blocks back in September 2012 when Power Auras died and also to TouchyMcFeel for his awesome Weak Aura tutorial videos on YouTube, you really should subscribe to his channel regardless of your Weak Aura abilities.

There are four in total, one for each spec and one for all specs and for them to work effectively you will need at least 2 of them; the one for your main spec and the all specs version.My discipline set up is at the top of the post, the holy one is shown below:



and below is my shadow spec one showing the offensive spells which I do NOT track when in either the Discpline or Holy specs:




Rather than paste all the code here I have uploaded them to pastebin.com and all you need to do is cut and paste them from there into your Weak Aura Import box.

A more detailed look at the auras are on my Weak Auras For Priests page but if you just want the auras, the four imports are:

• All Specs Weak Auras Import String
• Discipline Weak Auras Import
• Holy Weak Auras Import
• Shadow Weak Auras Import

When importing make sure you manually copy and paste from the lower box on pastebin, as whenever I try to import using their clipboard feature my strings get rejected despite it copying exactly the same text. Makes no sense but the manual method does work.

If you have any feedback on these imports or need help with Weak Auras just post a comment below or send an email to evlyxx at evlyxx dot co dot uk.

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A simple sunrise over Elwynn Forest. more »

WARNING: RANTY POST

Finally I have had enough of this Random Loot crap that we're getting with both bonus rolls and the RNG loot system on world bosses and Raid Finder.

A bit of background, I've been killing Sha and Nalak almost all expansion so far I have a combined 26 kills and as I'm a raider I've used my bonus roll hoping for a piece of Tier Loot. That makes a total of 52  chances of loot. So far I have won 2 times once from the drop and another from the bonus roll. Both wins were on the same glorious day that I purchased my 522 legs from the Shado Pan Assault and what did I win? 2x tier legs. These were both downgrades and I have therefore never equipped the 1 pair of pants I didn't disenchant.

I have had better luck in normal raids with my bonus roll but thus far in the expansion I had not actually owned 2 pieces of tier loot that were worth equipping because the non tier loot I have had drop in normal raids has been better even allowing for the 2 set bonus until I got a Raid Finder tier 15 helm to upgrade the 489 rep item I had to go with my tier 15 gloves that I won last week. /cheer

Now this week the bonus roll has screwed me over, on our Megaera kill I decided to use one of my Mogu Runes of Fate as I was hoping for the Inscribed Bag of Hydra Spawn while accepting that this was a 1 in 3 chance I could at least have won the got unlucky and won the Gleaming-Eye Shoulders and used them for my shadow off-spec. The 3rd option is a set of bracers that come with a random enchant, the Frostborn Wristwraps, which while they do not have a spirit option they do come with crit and mastery which are still beneficial for a disc priest so not a total loss.

So when I won loot I was overjoyed, then a little sad when I won the bracers, then angry when I realised that I had won hit items. No fear I'll raise a ticket and get them swapped, not for the trinket I wanted but at least a healer compatible set of bracers. The reply to my ticket is shown below:



That simply is NOT good enough. I'll be appealing against this not because I expect it to be overturned but to make Blizzard aware that I am not pleased with the system overall.

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Today is the coming of 5.3 and like most other classes, us priests haven't been left alone this patch. Discipline has been nerfed slightly once again as Atonement heals now only heal for 90% of the damage instead of 100%, but Penance does heal for 10% more but the cost of this is 10% reduction in damage done, also the Glyph of Smite no longer transfers the 20% extra damage dealt by Smite to healing via Atonement. The other Disc change is that Borrowed Time now causes the next spell to be cast/channeled 15% faster not applying a 15% haste boost, which sounds like a buff rather than a nerf.

Holy/Shadow priests in 25 man groups will now see Divine Hymn/Vampiric Embrace cap at heal 12 targets while 10 man group will remain capped at 6 players.

Disc and Holy both get changes to Mass Dispel as it now has a flat cast time of 0.5seconds which means the Glyph of Mass Dispel is is to be changed to dispel buffs/debuffs that are normally undispellable, which was previously a feature of the spell. As a PVE priest that is a buff as it now means the glyph is only needed for PvP.

Whilst talking about PVP, has received a makeover. Healing priests get a 1 minute reduction to the previously 6 minute cooldown while shadow priests get a 4 minute increase to 10 mins on the CD which place the spell into the category of no longer being usable while in Arenas or Rated Battlegrounds.

For our shadowy brethren, there is only one other change, a fix to the Glyph of Mind Flay's movement speed increase bug as this was not stacking correctly.

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So Blizz have finally announced a date for 5.3, tomorrow! I'm sad it wasn't a week earlier so they did something on my birthday but hey I'm not one to complain about new content.

What am I looking forward to most in 5.3? Well to be honest the patch hasn't interested me until today so what follows is my initial views of the content without having seen any of, so things may well change!

New battleground and arena venues are always a welcome addition, it gives me some more achievements that I'll not stand a hope of hell of getting and gives me something to whine about when trying to keep up in the achievement race with with Artherion, damn him and his PVP prowess. 

Then of course we have some new scenarios and some heroic scenarios too, as a healer though I am worried that there may be no place for me in these heroic scenario groups unless I choose to go shadow or want to be missing out on the challenging times/goals they have built in. I must admit when I heard of scenarios coming to the game I was over joyed as I thought these would be a replacement for the old epic quests we had way back. Sadly my hopes were dashed when they arrived and were basically little more than 3 man dungeons for level capped players. They could be so much more if they were available to players of all levels. I@m hoping things may change as time passes but for me they leave a lot to be desired.

There will sadly be no more 5 mans this expansion, I am saddened by this especially as I was hoping for some extra challenge mode dungeons. I guess they will come in 6.0. While talking about Challenge Modes, there is now a Fail Bag as a reward for doing the daily quest. This item has a chance to drop ilvl 516 items like Immaculate Pandaren Wand or just the usual 28g.

The storyline continuation is of great interest to me and I'll be heading off to the Barrens to see what the heck is going on there. Having max level toons on both factions I can get the full story although being primarily Alliance I think I'll be on the weaker side of that story for most of the time. 

The continuation of the Wrathion questline is also of great interest and I'm hoping that it actually starts to get interesting rather than more "go get lucky in LFR with drops to get the next item". Why can't we have more questing like we had with the Lion's Landing back in 5.1? Here's hoping for something along those lines in 5.3.

There are, as always, a whole load of class changes, the generic one of interest is that intelligent heals will now prefer the most needy players and pets will have a lower priority than players. I will be doing a separate post on the priest changes tomorrow.

The biggest list of changes though goes to Pet Battles. The notable changes are are:

• Pet Battle dues can now be watched by non competing players;
• Battle pets' recent ability loadouts will now be saved when pets are swapped in and out of battle slots;
• New pet drops in the Throne of Thunder, the Thunder Isle and Northrend;
• New pet drops in Burning Crusade raid dungeons;
• Pet Battle daily quests on Pandaria, Beasts of Fable and Spirit Tamer quests will award experience, valor, and Lesser Charms of Good Fortune;

Loot drops in Raid Finder can now be assigned to an off spec rather than the spec you have queued for. This is great especially as it means I can now queue as healer on Evlyxx and get DPS drops for my off-spec. I guess the theory is that hybrid classes are more likely to queue as healer in order to get faster queues, so expect a whole load of under geared healers in your Raid Finder groups.

Then there is the fix to one of my biggest bugbears in this expansion random loot drops and the bonus roll which is going to be weighted so every time you fail to win anything on a boss you're more likely to win next time than you were before. With my track record on world boss kills (including bonus rolls) of 44 chances of loot on the Sha of Anger and 8 chances on Nalak and I have only won 2 items (T14 legs on the same kill of the Sha after I had purchased 522 legs from the Shado Pan Assault) I'm hoping to get some success at last and get a tier set bonus active.

In PvP there have been massive changes. Resilience has been removed from all armour and players nw have 65% resilience regardless of armour worn. However, items that previously had resilience now have extra PvP Power. I am really not sure how this changes anything as PvP will still heavily favour those folks with gear as PvE geared players will still have their damage nerfed hard compared to PvP equipped players, but lets wait and see before we condemn it. Also when entering a PvP arena all gear will be scaled down to ilvl 496 (gear of lower ilvl will NOT be scaled up though).

The Brawler's Guild has had a few more levels added to it, /whoop I don't know of anyone that partakes in this anymore most folks got their pass and a few levels then stopped way before they hit max level. Maybe the mount reward will motivate some more folks to try it out and stick with it.

The void binders are back which means more upgrades for your BiS items this only affects PvE gear as PvP gear is capped at ilvl 496 anyway although the old Dreadful and Malevolent gear can still be upgraded but to be honest, the honor is better spent buying new gear that will be of higher ilvl than even the upgraded items.

Lastly, the best additions in the patch are that the experience to level from 85-90 has been reduced by 33% at each level and the Golden Lotus rep gate has been removed. Finally the expansion is looking alt friendly.

My final words, are concerning the change that we didn't get. Motes/Spirits of Harmony remain soulbound, why the heck aren't these Bind on Account yet. I have loads of them on toons that have no use for them and none on toons that do. Damn you Blizzard!

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This week I have spent a lot of time on my lock, Strigimaga. Part of that has included trying to finalise a non-tier set transmog. 2 items of which has meant spending a lot of time inside Blackrock Mountain and that included a trip to Blackwing Lair in search of a particular trash epic drop, which sadly didn't happen. It did however mean that I had to solo Razorgore which on the 4 tries on Evlyxx I had not managed to do. Seems Strigimaga, is a little more robust than Evlyxx.

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A screenshot today of me flying around Townlong Steppes. Not much of a story here other than a high number of my randomly taken screenshot (thanks to the MultiShot addon) are of me flying around. Enjoy. more »

While I may have been slack lately here on the blog the same hasn't been true in real life or in game. My guild, have been trying all expansion to set up an RBG team and I had been resisting the urge to join in. Partly because I got my hands full with raiding but mostly because I've never been a big PVPer (or particularly good at it). I have however now joined in the and the team is now coming together under the leadership of Dribblebutt and Siyara. 

The raiding has been going well too as we have now added 3 kills in the past 2 weeks after having a few issues with the "farm" bosses slowing us down which meant we were getting very little time to progress and as we still needed gear it was a little early to start extending raid ids.

Annoyingly, my shifts at work have meant I missed the last 3 weeks of raiding Throne of Thunder and that included the first kill on Megaera, missing 1st kills sucks but having had almost no time even wiping on a boss makes that suck a load more as I feel I have missed out on a whole chunk of content. As a raid leader though it pleases me that the guys can perform without me there and is a testament to the work my no. 2, Artherion puts in.

Thankfully, I did get back into raiding this week and Wednesday night we were on fire and managed to clear the first 5 bosses in under 90 minutes 1 shotting everything upto Megaera. This meant that we had a full raid and a half to work on progression and in the 90 minutes after the mid-raid break we managed to kill Ji'Kun.

Thursday was therefore a night for Durumu. Now I have had real issues with Durumu in raid finder, not because I'm a dumbass who dies to the beam but because I simply cannot see a way through the Eye Sores. This was a major worry but after this week it seems that it is a little easier to follow people when using a birds eye view and I did sometimes see the path but only when it was a good route. Just proof that a good idea spoiled by bad implementation, I wonder if colour blind mode makes it easier? hmm.

On top of those two things, I'm still running challenge modes as me and the guys keep pushing to get golds in the remaining ones. Sadly, the ones we have left are the real tough ones and the margin for error is really tiny and one mistake is meaning that we're failing by a few seconds. 

Lastly, my time in game has been absorbed by leveling my warrior to 90, taking my count to seven. I bet the local old folks home haven't got that many! Now all I need to do is gear her up in both tank and dps gear and I'm good to go to the next one. 

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Live action from a recent trip the Scarlet Halls Challenge Mode, although I seem to be very inactive and an evade mob too wtf is that all about. more »

Tortos is a static boss with a single phase. Tortos has 6 main abilities:

1. Furious Stone Breath is cast once his Fury reaches 100. This deals massive raid-wide damage and so MUST be interrupted by kicking a Whirl Turtle at Tortos.
2. Rockfall is an ability that causes stalactites to fall from the roof of the cave, dealing high damage to players within 5 yards and lower damage to anyone within 20 yardsof the point of impact, which are clearly marked several seconds in advance, by blue circles.
3. Quake Stomp is an ability that stuns all players for 1 second, and deals 65% of maximum HP as Physical damage and increasing the frequency of Rockfall for 8 seconds.
4. Snapping Bite is a highly damaging ability used on the tank roughly every 8-10 seconds and deals a large amount of Physical damage.
5. Growling Fury is cast if there is no one in melee range of Tortos which increases his fury generation therefore reducing the cooldown on Furious Stone Breath.
6. Whirl Turtles will be cast every 60 seconds and summons 3 adds which cannot be tanked.

Whirl Turtles deal damage to players within 5 yards and a knock back. They can be attacked by melee players from farther away than 5 yards due to their large hitboxes. When a Whirl Turtle is close to dying, it casts Shell Block making it immune to damage and it becomes harmless and stops moving.

When this happens it can be kicked using the extra action button all players are given during this fight. This ability is only available when the player is close to a Shell Blocking turtle. Using the extra action button kicks the turtle in the direction that the player is facing.

Using Kick Shell causes the turtle to fly through the air. When it comes into contact with an enemy, the turtle interrupts their spell cast and debuffs them with Shell Concussion for 20 seconds, causing them to take 25% increased damage. Kicking turtles in this way is essential for interrupting Tortos' Furious Stone Breath. As 3 Whirl Turtles spawn every minute and Tortos casts 1 Furious Stone Breath every 45 seconds there should always be enough turtles to kick, you should never run out of Turtles to interrupt these casts.

Every 30 seconds a group of Vampiric Cave Bats enters the room. The bats have normal aggro tables and their only special ability is Drain the Weak which deals a small amount of damage but heals each bat for 50x the damage dealt IF the target has <350k hp="" nbsp="" p="" remaining.="">
The strategy is ridiculously simple but execution of this needs to be flawless:

• Tanks: MT tanks Tortos the OT should pick up the bats and tank them next to Tortos.
• Melee DPS: focus on killing Tortos and the bats and when the turtles spawn should try to get a few hits and apply slows
• Ranged DPS: focus all DPS on Whirl Turtles and only DPS Tortos when no Whirl Turtles are still up.
• Healers: Keep MT above 65% HP and OT above 360K HP.
• A ranged DPS/healer should be assigned to kicking a Whirl Turtle at the Tortos to interrupt every Furious Stone Breath.
• Everyone: avoid the falling stalactites caused by Rockfall.
• Everyone: use personal defensive abilities if your HP is below 70% when Quake Stomp is about to be cast.

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