Curator... Dead! Check Mate!

This is a couple of days late, but my guild managed to down both The Curator and fight our way to the Chess event on Monday night. Yay for us!

We had cleared Moroes, Opera, and Maiden on Sunday and that left us a quick kill of Attumen and then into the side door for our run to The Curator. Attumen went down like the sissy he's become and we regrouped (a few people swapping alts for mains) at the back door. The trash to Curator was downed pretty quickly, and we made our first attempt.

We were doing significantly better on this attempt than in the previous week and were keeping up with the flares pretty well. We were still marginal on DPS, though. Our shadow priest was complaining that his big hitting spells had too much cast time and his DoTs not enough time to run. We got to the 4th Evocation or so, and started to have healers running low or out of mana and it resulted in a wipe. An "improved wipe", but still no sparklies.

A couple of members decided to swap characters. Our shadow priest went to his hunter and our holy paladin went to his shaman. This appeared to make all the difference. The extra hunter DPS on the flares -- and the pet -- allowed us to down the flares in that magical 8-9 second window and we were able to put the 10th one down in time to get DPS on The Curator during Evocation. The shaman has those great totems and nice chain healing ability to keep up with flare damage. On the first Evocation, we dropped him to about 66% -- right on schedule -- and went back to killing flares. Most of what we'd read/heard indicated that he should drop somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd Evocation. Second Evocation went well, too. No deaths to this point and he was down around 35%. Back to flares and we continued to time these well. On the 3rd Evocate, we really poured it on, and got him below the enrage point before he came out. Yay... no more flares and just DPS the snot out of him. He went down. No one in our group did. We went from smashing our faces into him a week ago, to smashing his face with no deaths. Cheers for us!


As luck would have it, [Garona's Signet Ring] and the Paladin/Rogue/Shaman T4 Glove token dropped. Our holy paladin was bummed out, having missed the drop since he swapped characters, but at least he was on his Shaman. The protection paladin won the roll anyway, and -- as luck would have it -- I won the roll on the ring. Uh oh... that's two epics in two nights. Should I have not rolled? My assumption was that since everyone from "night one" had gotten either an item or a purple shard and that the loot was "reset". After further discussion this week in our guild forums, no one seemed upset with me and it was a fairly nice upgrade from the blue ring I was sporting.

As many guilds/groups find... the trash leading into the Chess Event area is -- as my guildmate put it -- "soul destroying". There were a few complaints but we managed to get through it. We suffered one wipe very near the end when line-of-sight got us through a doorway. Other than taking a lot of time and our raid leader losing his notes on the mobs and their charms, things went well albeit slowly. On a Monday night with The Curator down, no one was willing to give up until we got our "free loot" at Chess.

The Chess Event took us two tries while everyone figured out how to move and fight, but the second time was easy, even if Medivh did cheat... twice? The chest was opened and wouldn't you know it... more hunter loot. The [Fiend Slayer Boots] and [Ring of Recurrence] dropped. I was sure the other hunter in the group was going to roll on the boots, but as the timer ticked down for disenchant, the other guy indicated that he had better boots in his PVP reward item. I rolled. I was still wearing -- on-and-off -- either a blue or a green pair, and these were clearly an upgrade, even un-enchanted and un-socketed. Holy cow! Three epics in two nights.


I was tired and feeling a little guilty the next morning, but after 'splaining myself in our guild forums, no one seemed fazed. I have nearly perfect attendance for raid nights and since I'm gearing up and growing DPS, there's no reason for items to be DE'd. So... I'm up to 6 Karazhan epics and really noticing the improved damage output. I still have to get gems and enchants on the boots and enchant my spear (still trying to decide whether to enchant my [Sonic Spear] or my Thrallmar rep one).

Anyone out there with thoughts? :)

This curator is equipped for gallery protection... SHUT UP!

Grrr... stupid Curator. We're a casual guild and don't have several hours each night we schedule raids (currently Sunday and Monday) to beat our head against a single boss over and over again. We try to limit runs to 2 hours -- sometimes a bit more.

This past weekend, we had a great run into Karazhan.

On Saturday, we decided to attempt to make a beeline for the Curator, so we hit Moroes first. One shot. Woot! We head for Opera next. Now... my guild has taken down Opera once without me, so it's not exactly a guild first, but damned if we didn't one-shot Romulo and Julianne, too. (It's our second week in a row getting this event.) It's the first time I had seen them die. I had my fingers crossed for the Beastmaw Pauldrons, but they didn't drop. Instead, Romulo's Poison Vial did. There was some chatter on TeamSpeak about this being a great DPS trinket. My +Hit was already pretty good, but I figured I'd roll on it. The only other melee/ranged DPS class in the group was the rogue, and he had already gotten the dagger from Moroes. Didn't do the casters any good. I didn't figure the tanks would want a trinket like that, so...

/roll 100
Annai rolls a 100

LOL! I am -- without a doubt -- the worst roller in WoW. Every time something comes up that I *really* want, I typically roll in the single digits. PUGs along for the ride with 8-9+ of *my* guild members have gotten both the crossbow and wrists from Attumen ahead of me in Kara. Random numbers hate me. Anyway... I wasn't even sure I *wanted* the item, but felt I should roll anyway. OF COURSE I BLOW A 100 ROLL ON THAT! I felt bad because even if someone else *did* want to roll, it's kind of useless to roll against that.

After reading up on the item, I'm not sure it's that great -- reviews are mixed -- but it did give me a 2+% DPS boost on the last Maiden fight (more later). At least that's what Recount said. So... I'll probably continue to use it until something better drops.

So... wonder of wonders. Both lead-ins to The Curator are down and it's only an hour into the run. We ran through the now open stage door, heading through the remainder of the Opera Hall area and on to the Broken Stair area. Got to the pre-Curator pulls and did mostly fine with them. And... there he was....

...and we wiped. Spectacularly. Didn't even see the first Evocation on the first attempt. The flares were murdering us. We tried twice, I think, and were stuck with some re-spawns and some guild members who needed to log.

No problem... we've got another *whole night* to try him out. The next night, we cleared the first trash mobs up to him and gave it three more tries. We got slightly better each time, but on each attempt, we had lost at least one raid member before the first Evocation and we weren't keeping up with the flares so not getting in damage during the Evocations. A few different strats were tried, but my thinking is that we didn't have enough class diversity. No warlock. No druid. No shaman. We were missing some buffs and potential tools there.

So as not to make the evening end on a bad note, we decided to back-track to Attumen and maybe Maiden. Attumen went down like a ton of bricks and dropped a couple of upgrades. The good thing for us is that people still need some things from him, so it's not just a rep kill. We lost the other hunter, but decided to press on to Maiden. I've only seen her go down once, and would you believe we actually one-shotted her, too, with 9 people. Pretty scary for our little band of casual misfits. :)