Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Minimum Gear Required for Anzu

Well its seems my blog gets the most hits for my Anzu posts, so i thought i would revisit it.

The druid mount is considered to be one of the most exclusive mounts due to the fact you need a druid to farm it, and it looks so different from everything else.

Since a lot of people are doing this on their alt druids they don't have the greatest gear, so they are wondering what the minimum gear requirement is. My friend who has a feral druid with 36k hp was laughing at how easy this is, i myself found this difficult when i started soloing this, I only have about 25k hp in bear.

I've been playing mainly Moonkin in WOTLK and some Resto, so i've attempted to do Anzu as a Moonkin, and although my gear isn't great it's not the worst either, and i found it really really hard.

Feral has 2 specs now and i've been playing with feral kitty as my offspec, however i found i just didn't have the dps in cat and i didn't have the survivability in bear to do this.

So just to be able to solo Anzu i've respecced as a feral bear, i took all the tanking talents and things that would reduce damage, i've found heals in feral gear are absolute crap, and against Anzu, you don't want to shift out of bear that much as you can get stunned shifting and take damage in caster form.

So how much gear do you need? Well my bear tank is only in a few purples, 3 from PVP a few from instances, but then i am also wearing blue items from questing, and even a trinket from TBC.

All up i have 25k HP, 20000 armour, and 6k attack power. And i would say this is probably around the minimum limit at what you would want your stats to be.

I still advocate clearing the last boss Ikiss first while your learning this, as stealthing through the back door will make it much quicker after wipes, also clearing mobs from the Ikiss's room reduces the risk of getting feared into another group of mobs.

Fighting Ikiss as feral is quite easy, just go in as cat and dps him quickly until he does his AoE, run behind a pillar heal up and rinse and repeat.

Clearing out the mobs is a bit tougher, make sure you throw 2 hots on yourself, sleep the bird, go bear then use your CD's and burst as many mobs down as possible, you want to focus fire if possible as burning a mob down reduces the incoming damage, swipe just doesn't do enough damage to get the groups down in time before they beat the crap out of you.

On the larger groups you may want to wait for your savage roar cooldown.

On Anzu, hot yourself then just go in and tank him, i find improved leader of the pack is enough to keep you healed up going into the first bird phase.

When the birds drop you can just AoE swipe them down, if you have AP trinkets you may want to activate these.

I always find this the breaking point of if you can do this or not, Anzu pops out of his phaze after a set amount of time, so you need to get the birds down as quickly as possible having Anzu on you as well as a bunch of birds just puts you behind further.

Once the birds are down you will be back on Anzu again, you will need to get up to full health before the next bird phase, there are a few ways to do this, use a pot, a healthstone, bear heal.

DPS Anzu down until he phazes out again, if you really need a heal, as soon as he phazes out walk away and try to get a regrowth off on yourself (i've had him hit before when he's phazed out... go figure), just be careful as there's been a few times he drops a stun on me as i shift out, or he debuffs you so you take damage on casts anyway. I try not to shift if possible so i use trinkets for maximum survivability.

Take out the second round of birds, and if you can survive that with enough HP, you should be able to finish Anzu off.

Just a few tips that have worked for me.

I save barkskin for the birds phase to reduce dmg.

I use trinkets for survivability

I use the eng trinket Noise Machine, i know it doesn't help my dps at all, but the fight takes me about 6 minutes, so it will proc 5-6 times saving me 5500-6600 worth of damage.

I use the TBC trinket Argussian Compass which drops from the Black Stalker in Heroic Underbog, yes it's an old trinket, but i can activate it during the bird phase to save me 1150 damage each time.

I find getting to the bird phase is relatively easy, it's surviving the bird phase with enough HP that was causing me problems.

If you have the Bear Heal Glyph, it will also give you 20% more from a pot.

Take a pot and hit up a Warlock for a healthstone, they are on different cooldowns.

You can pot and healthstone in bear form.

This is just a guide to help you if your in crap gear, this fight becomes relatively easy once you gear up.

Yes i have crap crap feral gear, this is my off off spec.

Good luck with the mount dropping! I've done this over 100 times and haven't seen it once yet.

Not Children's Week...

Well having a matron in Dalaran telling me to adopt an orphan is not children's week....

After not doing any of the special event achievements ever, i'd finally decided to attempt to do the ones from last week. I thought it was children's week, after all why else would you tote an orphan around town and show them the sites, but after logging a ticket and saying, why the hell is making my totem caps flags in PVP and showing them the sites not getting me achievements, they replied, because your and idiot and it's not chicldrens week. Ok they didn't say idiot, but i can say that's what they were thinking...

Good luck to all of you that actually do all your achievements for your mount!

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Children's Week!

Well it's Children's Week, i must admit i've never been that hot on the World Events, doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff, e.g. getting achievements has never really appealed to me, after all, it doesn't improve my character, doesn't get me better gear, make my character stronger, or give me extra abilities that would help my poor game skills.

But... achievements that give you extra items i'd actually use? I'm up for that, so finally after thinking about getting a 310% flying mount i had to look up how to actually get one.

Let's see the options.
Top 0.5% PVP Arena
Top raiding achievements
Holiday Achievement

Hmm as a casual gamer it doesn't seem like i have many options. So Children's week started up this week, and i thought, well i have some new friends playing, why not do some crappy achievements with them. So we started the Children's Week quest line and took little orphan Annie on a tour of Azeroth and completed the quests.

Before completing the last quest and taking little orphan Annie back to the orphanage, i tried to do a couple of the achievements. Well the easy ones, like have orphan out while hearthing, i did it, no achievement, my friend did it no achievement, so i figured we'd have to finish the quest line and get one of the permanent pets before doing it.

So maybe i'm dumb, ignorant or naive or all of the above. Handed my quest back, got a new pet that is NOT an orphan, and this dude won't let me do achievements either.

So i'm guessing the quests are a bit bugged, i've heard you can get another orphan from Shattrah, i may try that out, but a 1 year quest line to get a flying mount? And can you imagine if the achievements bug out and you have to wait for one more year.....

Riding Skills in 3.2!!

Well i finally got my rogue to level 60 last weekend, I'd heard riding skills were going to be cheaper in 3.2, how cheap? Well 50g down from 600g, a significant saving and something i was wiling to wait 2 days for, after all it's probably taken me a year to get my rogue to level 60 so what's to more days!

What the exciting news was, is that flying mounts are now available for level 60's. They flying training was 600g and the mount was about 50g.

So where to buy mounts and skills? Well if your 60, i would say you've made your way over into TBC already.

Alliance can purchase the epic ground mount riding skill from the Honor Hold trainer, as well as the flying skills and mount. I thought i would have to hotfoot it back to Elwynn forrest for the riding skills but with the player base now not even wanting to spend 10g on repairs let alone 10 minutes to travel, Blizz have made picking up the riding stuff more convenient.