Reputation Grind

I’ll be perfectly honest here … it took us much less time to figure this out than I expected. I think I’ve said that on every Firelands  boss so far, though.

We read multiple strats, combined those with what we’d learned in our short-lived pulls the night before, and emailed suggestions back and forth during the day yesterday. Ultimately, we went with me healing the first two crystals, with help from Zarm.  Then I switched to tank healing and stayed on the tank for the duration, while Slice swapped over to crystals. I believe Zarm flexed between the two throughout the fight, although since he helped a *lot* on the first ones, he ended up with as many or more stacks than I had by the end of the fight.

To stack them up super fast, we popped Time Warp when the first crystal appeared. We had a four DPS crystal rotation, but it started off with Cayle taking as many stacks as he could, basically until he died. He was trying to get up around 20 stacks. We did our best to keep him up, but Lyss soulstoned him so he could pretty much just be a sacrifice. Seriously. Any fight where we get to sacrifice Cayle is an awesome fight. Once Time Warp faded I would use Divine Favor for the haste buff. Based on advice I had read elsewhere, I was using Holy Shock on CD, interspersed with 1 HoPo Word of Glory and Flash of Light as filler. Now, any other time I would not use Flash of Light except for the occasional Infusion of Light proc. But since the idea here is to cast as many heals as possible in the duration of the crystal to build stacks, there really is no other option. This strat was allowing me to get anywhere from 60-90 stacks, depending on how long Cayle lived. The effect of the huge stacks when I swapped over to tank healing was quite impressive.

This first shot is from one of our failed attempts, but I have to show it. It’s not every day you get to land a Lay on Hands for 1 million hitpoints!

This was during a Decimation Blade. Make sure you pay attention and are ready for that ability … it will knock your tank down to 10% of his health and cannot be mitigated. Arv and I coordinated which turn we would be using our LoH as it is naturally a great way to bring him back to full health. But you won’t have one for every time it comes up (unless you’re stacking paladins I suppose) so timing big heals to land right after it hits is going to be necessary. I had him die on me once just a tenth of a second before a Divine Light was going to hit. Very frustrating.

As you can see there, I had 99 stacks at that point. I believe I had 87 or 88 on our kill. Is there a better way to do it than sacrificing someone? Perhaps. But it worked to get the stacks quickly. An unfortunate side effect of the heavy FoL usage meant my mana pool took a beating though. On some of the close attempts my low mana warning kept screaming at me, even when I had Divine Plea and Arcane Torrent on CD and had also taken a mana pot … with my alchemist stone equipped. Was I going to run out? Probably not … but when that warning goes off, I instinctively hold back. That can’t happen here. So I made a change a couple of pulls before our successful attempt … I put my (dammit! my mind is blanking … what’s the name of the VP trinket? oh yeah …) Core of Ripeness on in place of the alchemist stone. I lost a chunk of haste from the stone, but I gained the on-use spirit increase, and I happen to be pretty good about clicking the damn thing on cooldown. It was enough to keep my mana from yelling at me, at least.

Look at that, we even let Cayle live! (after he used the soulstone of course)

The one thing I didn’t swap in, was the gloves that I won last night on Rhyolith. I gemmed them, enchanted them, reforged them … and then forgot to save them to my holy set. Doh!

Let’s see if I did any better on the lineup shot this time. Between Ring of Frost and hunter flares, you guys make it hard to get good screenshots. Bitches!

LtoR: Adoe, Galanna, Zerlegen … yes, that’s right folks, three, count em, THREE huntars. Liyhe is sitting in front of me. Then we have Lyssianna, Cayle, Pix, Cayle’s sunflower, Zarm, and Arvash.

4 of 7! I still can’t quite believe we’ve gotten this far already. The pulls on Alysrazor though … well, I’ve said it before that I think a fight is going to take us longer to learn, and then the team goes out and proves me wrong, so .. maybe she won’t be so bad after all.