Ulduar, Turnover and Trolls.

OMG inaugural post!!

Well, My name is Nareck and I am a Troll Hunter on the Terenas Realm in the guild Really Bad Players. My intention is to blog about the hunter class in an effort to educate people (myself mostly) on the hunter class and reflect on my raiding experience as a hunter. I like to write and express myself through written language so this works out well for me.

So the hot topic around the interwebs for bloggers like myself is currently the new raid content Ulduar. I guess some reflection on the raid as a whole before i get to the meat and potatoes of my post here would be good.

-Ulduar, first and foremost, is visually stunning. From the Expedition base camp all the way through Generals room and Yogg's prison, the graphic detail is stunning at times. The Dev's really show boated what they could do and what this game is capable of. The Descent into Madness is one such example of this, with shards of stained glass floating in mid air all reflecting different lights and rotating in off-axis angles at different speeds. Another example of the Dev's graphic prowess is in the area where XT-002 Deconstructor is located. Specifically when he exposes his heart, and the scrapbots and whatnot come out of the scrap piles. More than once i glanced, didn't notice anything, and continued to DPS his heart. In reality, the scrapbots were making their merry way to heal him and i simply didn't see them mixed in with the other scrap located in the pile. Sure i could gripe about this but I'm saving that for later.

-I am one who appreciates lore for what it is and enjoys it when it gets worked into the raid instances and there is a feeling of continuity in the story and what i see in game. For example, the quest chain you do in storm peaks that involves Loken and his brother (Thorim? i cant remember and I'm a t work right now). The point is that in the quest chain you see Loken and his Bro bro duke it out with his ginormous Proto Drake in the background somewhere and Loken "captures" them with what look like tentacles. Hmmm..... foreshadowing much? i think so. Now that i think about it, it was Thorim. During that quest chain he mentions Loken murdered his wife, and after you defeat Thorim in Ulduar, he asks if Sif was there, who was murdered by Loken. I don't recall the exact verbage of the fight but its an interesting story none the less. It gave me a sense of satisfaction when defeating Throim because it feels like I have finished the story or chain of events down to its resolution (being that he is still bat shit crazy but now he knows it. yay!) , this being one of the rare occasions in wow where i actually feel a sense of completion. I can think of maybe 2 other times i have felt that while playing but lets not get into the details of that.

- The Encounters. Now I could write a novel on the things i think about the encounters this time but ill save it, except for a choice few. One thing I can say for sure is the days of fighting just the boss itself are over. In Naxxramas, i would say about half of the bosses there required you to deal with no adds of any kind. It was mainly a tank and spank instance (see Patchwerk and Loatheb). The only boss I can think of in Ulduar that you deal with no adds of any kind is General Vezzax. You could count Flame Leviathan but I would consider the turrets adds due to them being a separate entity from the boss, even though they are attached. As for the difficulty level of these encounters, the only one that i found challenging at first was Mimiron. With how much damage is being done to the raid, a lot hinges on a clean phase 1 and a near flawless P2. Other than that, if your using a solid strategy and can communicate well as a raid, none of these bosses will hold you up for long. Now one thing that I kind of scratched my head on was the fact that Yogg-Saron drops the same iLevel loot as all the other bosses in the instance. He also drops the coveted Shoulder Tier token as well but besides that, no difference in Loot item level. So I was kinda pissed at first to be honest but then i started thinking about it. In Naxxramas the only boss with some amount of RNG (enough to wipe you at least) was Kel'Thuzad. The MC coupled with the Aggro drop was enough to kill a dps that wasn't paying attention and block a slew of people at the same time. Not only that but the fight took like 45 min anyways due to the adds and all that BS in the beginning. So it made sense that he would drop almost all BIS items (Envoy, Journey's End, Turning tide anyone?) for that difficulty of content. Now that almost every boss has a hard mode in Ulduar it makes sense to me that they would all drop better ilvl loot when you kill them hard mode. Therefor making it worth spending extra time on said hard mode instead of speeding to the 1 boss with better loot. I like the flexibility the raid has when choosing what boss they want to do hard mode and get better loot off of.

So i wanted to talk about other things in this post too but i seem to have rambled too long. Ill get to the turnover and Trolls in the next post! XP