Illhoof dead, Karazhan cleared

We’ve never really bothered with Illhoof because he was just the pain in the ass before the 2.1 changes. Nonetheless, after we killed off all the other bosses in Karazhan we gave him a try and managed to kill him in 2 pulls. Basically just the same strat, except imps hit for a lot less, the boss is a wimp and the demon chains seemingly don’t heal the boss for much.

Killshot

As for Netherspite, they added a new door that locks when engaging the boss and therefore you’re stuck in the room during his banish phase. On the light side, they removed the shadow damage aura during the banish phase so you’re basically only dealing with breaths. It’s basically the same fight except everyone needs to be on their toes evading the breaths and the tank needs to be aware of when the banish phase ends to draw aggro right away (since it’s wiped once he shifts). Otherwise it’s not exactly too hard a fight, though harder than it was pre-patch.

Nightbane was nerfed significantly, specifically phase 2 damage levels have dropped at least a notch. Ground phase is more or less the same, but air phase bone rain hits for a lot less, and smoking blast is less frequent than before. He did wipe us once by taking off then breathing on the raid; he probably started the cast before he lifted, but we got him past the threshold before the breath fired and therefore he breathed in the middle of the flight animation (not facing the tank). Annoying, but I’d write it off as mere coincidence.

Someone needs to enlighten me on how the spawn works in the Servant’s Quarters, my hypothesis is this: After the room is cleared once, the first type of add you kill (dog/bat/spider) when they respawn determines the boss spawned. I will try this next week to get to some other boss other than the spider that we’ve been killing for so many weeks straight.

WoW 2.1 Patch : Changes and comments

The 2.1 patch has finally hit live and thankfully due to Mr. Buddha’s birthday being a public holiday here in Hong Kong I got a chance to do things outside of raids to experience some of the new 2.1 changes.

Druid epic flight form

One of my friend’s druid got everything ready to roll after the patch hit on Tuesday and he took us to Heroic Sethekk Halls to complete the quest. First of all the entire instance was nerfed into the ground, mobs hit as much as they did pre-patch, but on a fury warrior with sub-optimal gear. We had a geared out mage and burned the first boss down with all the adds running around like headless chicken.

We killed Talon King Ikiss with two people. Me and the druid tanking. The fury warrior, mage, and shadow priest died early in the fight because they either (1) forgot to LOS the AE, or (2) LOSed my heals. Without a dispeller to remove slow and my heals needing 3+ seconds to cast, we still managed to kill the boss. So much for Heroic mode.

Now the quest boss was something different altogether. After reading some strats from the PTR, we went and tried him, except the druid spent the entire fight trying to find the spirits to HoT them, to no avail. After a wipe because we were simply OOM around 40%, the spirits spawned… after the boss reset. We did it again with the spirits being activated only during the banish phase and we killed the boss with ease. Shitty drops though.

Alliance druid epic flight form is ugly as hell. You lose your non-epic form too, just like you lose bear form to dire bear.

Shaman Buff?

I’m no enhancement or elemental shaman so I will not comment on the WF/Clearcasting nerf. They, at this moment in time, do not affect me.

The changes to Healing Stream/Mana Spring totem is very very very welcome. It clears out a lot of frustration on refreshing them as all your buff totems are now on the same timer, and mana spring is now actually very beneficial to place (from 450 mana gained to 900 mana gained at the initial cost of 120 mana), even more so with T4 2 piece.

Aside from that, the Healing Way talent was changed and you will notice that your Healing Waves heal for significantly more (my 3.6k base goes up to 4.5k 3 stacked). Not only that, it seems that they forgot to add the down-rank penalty to the bonus healed. My rank 1 healing wave for 23 mana heals for 100, but on a 3 stack it heals for 300+, not bad for racking up the Pendant of the Violet Eye.

Daily Quests

These are a blessing to any non-dps specced person. They’re easy, some of them don’t require killing any mobs, and they all give you 12g per run. I’ve done 5 per day so far and racking in 60G and 45 Apexis shard daily for less than an hour is definitely better than trying to farm with resto spec.

I haven’t bothered with the Netherwing and Ethereum quests yet, and am focusing on the Skyguard/Ogri’la ones for now. I would suppose the Netherwing quest areas are camped for the drake, and hence I’m shooting for the fugly manta rays to use as a mount (hey, I think they’re cute). I’m still around 1k away from having enough money to buy my 300 mount skill though, so that will take some time itself. The Skyguard quest chain in Skettis sounds like a complete pain in the ass.

The daily rescue quest in Skettis where you escorted the guy for about 100m where you fought less than 5 mobs was funny and will be duly repeated daily. I called my friends over saying “hey there’s a escort quest here”, we were all stunned when we saw the NPC run away 2 minutes later with the “quest complete” marker showing up.

Item Buffs

I’ve gained somewhere around 30 healing, 6 MP5, and 1.5k mana from switching to upgraded epics, very welcome changes as I can now cruise through Karazhan without heavy consumable use.

But of course, our upgraded epics with +15 ilvl meant a 20% increase to our repair bills. Two thumbs down.

Karazhan Changes

We’ve done most of Kara (Nightbane, Netherspite, Illhoof left), and due to the item upgrades and boss nerfs it was a lot less stressful than we had it before. First few bosses are roughly the same, we’ve been through them enough times to kill them even though our vent was down.

Summary: Midnight was hitting for so little I had more than half mana left when he died (but he has yet to drop my bracers), Moroes was more or less the same, Maiden not repenting the tank made the fight very smooth, Opera (R&J) was the same though really chaotic without vent, Curator I no longer had to pop fish+mageblood+manapot to last the fight and even had mana spare to pop a fire elemental during his evocation.

Aran is really easy now, I’ve heard that you can kill the adds but his last 40% was going down so fast it didn’t even matter anymore; shorter blizzards and no dragon-breath reduced the random factor from 50% to around 20. Medivh likes to cheat when playing chess. The prince is hitting for a lot less now, otherwise the fight is just the same except better gear meant that he is dying faster.

All in all the 2.1 changes are very welcome except with some bugs that still need to be fixed.

Nightbane comes crashing down

A little bit late I’d say comparing our progression on other content. The most apparent reason might be the fact that our guild never thought that we needed to hurry with Nightbane while Gruul was still alive and hence never put together a top team for Kara but instead dividing the players evenly into two groups (which is fair).

Our group setup were 3 warriors (2 prot, 1 fury), 1 rogue, 1 lock, 1 priest (shadow), 1 hunter, 1 Pally, 1 Druid (Feral), and me (Resto Shaman). Two of the mages assigned to our group went missing and hence we picked up the only person left in the guild without an Kara instance saved (the other prot warrior). From what I’ve seen in other Nightbane kills were a constant of 3 healers. I would agree that working with two is indeed rough, though I’m sure our shadow priest helped out on healing, since he had to stay out of shadow form for fear ward. The tank does take some considerable damage and in a long fight (I think our kill was 11 minutes) it can be pretty taxing on healer mana.

It was not a pretty kill. We did manage to get the flight phase ironed out, but not perfectly executed. People with the debuff still ran the wrong direction, a pally died (but SSed back up), and it was not controlled to where I would feel comfortable. Our druid died halfway because the priest forgot a fear ward, he resisted the fear and proceeded to be one shotted by Nightbane at 60%.

We we still working out the flight phase and therefore I wasn’t chugging any consumables, but after the 50% flight it all clicked all of a sudden and I started my mana pots, with just barely enough mana to survive until Nightbane’s death.

Killshot

Strategy was simple. Phase one is straight forward. For phase two the group gathered around the tank, the Bone Rained guy runs South, others run North. Pally main heals for the first few seconds of the flight phase to get Smoking blast and stray skellies. BoP for the Bone Rained, BRed hunters FD, rouges Vanish. Tanks pick up as many skellies they can. Tanks without mobs to tank taunt them off the MT, at 15 secs before landing healing stops, MT starts running around bandaging people, and the hunter misdirects to the tank just prior to landing.

It’s pretty straightforward except for the fact that it’s just so chaotic when the flight phase just starting with all the shit raining down from above. I’d say a good tank and pally makes or breaks the fight as it makes such a big difference between healers running out of mana and random people dying during the flight phase.

Petty thieves and just downright idiots

There’s really nothing amusing about petty thieves that just grab a bottle of shampoo at the local supermarket and make a break for the door. You giggle when the security catches them, they get sent to court and get fined for a minor amount of cash. People who can’t resist the urge of greed, pretty common I’d day.

Now today’s story is about a guy who first failed his resisting of the urge of greed, and then subsequently failed his resist of the urge for sex:

http://www.twbbs.net.tw/1791527.html

Now, for those who can’t read Chinese: This guy who breaks in to some random house after hearing the inhabitants leaving, and just as he was about to move the DVD player back to his own place, he finds a set of adult video lying near the TV. Probably lured by the lusty cover of whatever contained the video, he places it into the DVD player and starts to watch it. He doesn’t stop there: probably he got a bit too high from the video, ransacked for a couple of female underwear in the room and… starts jerking off in the house he broke into with the underpants of the female owner.

Disgusting, I know. Now heres the funny part: The couple who lived in the house probably was getting something from the local convenient store, and returns home to find a stranger masturbating: in their house, watching their adult videos, and on their bed.

This is what the caption on the illustration below says:

Male owner: OMG! WTF!
Female owner: Oh! My undies!
Thief: Wait! I’m “coming” out! (In Chinese it’s the same as “I’m going out”)

I just can’t find the pity for this kind of people. I’m still trying to figure out why someone would do something like that. He either:

1. Doesn’t have a DVD player to play the adult videos at home;
2. Has never watched porn before;
3. Was a diehard fan of whoever the lead gal of the video was;
4. He really needed to get laid.

I’m not sure which, but it may be all of the above. Here’s advice to those stupid enough to try it again (not that I endorse such illegal activity, but): Take it all home first.

Review: Final Fantasy Tactics – Shishi Sensou

(Spoiler alert!)

This is the FFT port for the PSP that I mentioned in the last post that was released earlier on the 10th. I’ve already played through it once (I play too much), here’s whats new :

The music score is roughly the same (I wasn’t able to notice major differences, but hey the last game was 10 years ago). But they changed the opening prologue where it talks about swords, stones, and stories into a sequence of blooming flowers (?) from the old spinning sword. I’d say I like the old one better but I don’t think anyone cares.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new anime-esque sequences that are colored very similarly to the art in FFT that we’ve been familiar with. Very beautifully done albeit with no voice overs. There are around 5-10 such scenes and I think they were pretty enjoyable.

They’ve added two new characters, the first is Ruso who is seemingly the main character of the upcoming FFTA2 and Balthier from FFXII (I call him Han Solo, go figure). Ruso is basically a clone of Ramza in terms of skillset and Balthier’s default job is Sky Pirate, and his abilities is a combination of thief skills and Mustadio’s snipe skill plus one ability: It strikes 4 times at the cost of half damage per strike. Second to Thunder God Cid (Orlando), Balthier is one of the most unbalancing characters in the game. His base speed is faster than a ninja, his quad-strike is Dual-wielding for free, and he can use knight-sword and lances for giggles. Fortunately, the FF6 trick of quad-strike and dual-wield for 8 strikes doesn’t work.

Some small tweaks were made to the game to make certain fights that were overly harsh a bit easier. Unfortunately they also made the Genji set and Murasmune unable to be stolen from Elmdor. I spent an entire night trying to control the final Lamberry fight to steal his set only to find out that he was immune to thievery without even having the Maintenance skill; what a cheater. I’m so good at it now I can write you a guide for 100% success.

Instead, they added a story branch about Beowulf and Reize the dragon (after she returns to human form) where Reize gets kidnapped and we have to go save her. After a few battles we enter a room with a clergy of some sort and some generic baddies. A steal-able Murasmune can be found here as well as other rare goodies. After the boss dies he turns into something with more hit points than the final boss; fortunately he’s slow and doesn’t do much before he dies.

There are more other story branches at Chapter 4 to expand on the story, and it seems that in this version Agrius was given a lot more attention than in the previous FFT.

Two new jobs in the game: Dark Knight and Onion Knight. Onion Knight is easily obtainable but to make him powerful you need to master ALL jobs. Dark Knight is just ridiculous: not the character but the requirements. I’ve been nearly working on just the requirements on a character that I started with at the beginning and I’m not even near getting the class after I completed the game.

There’s also PvP and Co-op missions that can be played via WIFI but I have yet to find someone to try those with me.

The lag that everyone’s been complaining about is not really that bad. It does get rough some times, but since it is a portable device you can just look at other things while you wait for moves to get through or things to load etc. Using math:holy on 10 people is prime time to go do other things.

All in all FFT is still the solid game it was 10 years ago (well they haven’t changed anything really), if you have a PSP and liked the first FFT, I’d say it’s still worth it to go through it once again just to watch the animated scenes and have a good game to play on your portable device. If you’ve never played FFT then you definitely should give it a go.