Skip to main content

Solo-man

Recently, I've taken to soloing old-world raids since my guild is small and I usually can't play much during the evening when they're raiding. I did AQ20 all the way to the end, skipping a couple bosses, which was pretty easy. Often the trash is harder than the bosses, due to weird mechanics like eating you alive. (It's actually possible to solo those things as a tank paladin, you just have to stay at max range and hit exorcism and avenger's shield.)

The Molten Core trash is fairly easy, and the temptation to skip it often leads you to pulling 5-6 mobs. The Firelords are among the worst, as they spawn an add that multiplies like bacteria if you don't kill it quick. Plus, they silence you for 20 seconds, locking me out of everything but Hammer of the Righteous. Core Hound packs are probably the most annoying trash, as all 5 or so have to die with in 10 seconds or they get rezzed by their brethren.

I learned to not underestimate the power of the protection paladin. At one point, I accidentally pulled 2 Molten Destroyers, two Ancient Core Hounds (different from the packs), two Lava Annihilators, and a Firelord. The mobs are so big, I couldn't reliably target the firelord adds, and I let them get out of control. I was about to give up, but as it was a long run back, I decided to fight it out and get as many of them down as I could. I focused on the Firelord first, but by the time I got him down I was almost dead due to lack of Holy Shield, Sacred Shield and extra heals from Judgment of Light, and there were probably fifty adds spawned (at least, they were so overlapped I couldn't begin to count them). However, with my buffs back up, I noticed my health creeping back up--apparently with the fire resist aura, nearly all of the adds' attacks missed. They also have a despawn timer; after about 2 minutes they all died, and about five minutes later I finished off the rest of the mobs. That was exhilarating, especially because the run back from MC sucks.

I can't emphasize enough how powerful Sacred Shield is for soloing this stuff. With it up, I was able to heal myself to full just from Seal/Judgment of Light from -20k health. While fighting 6 trash mobs and 50+ Lava Spawns. In about 45 seconds.

I got a boss down, Garr, as I'm considering farming Thunderfury. Quite easy. Baron Geddon should be next--video time:

If you look at the armory link in the video, you'll see that this guy has very good gear, much better than mine. That means I'll have to build a fire resistance set to have a chance at success. More coming.

The oddest thing about this old stuff is that though you get little or no rewards (seriously, the MC trash drops nothing at least half the time), I had an absolutely fabulous time. Why is that? To be continued.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

The Setswana Grammar Manual

One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...