Celestial Tournament Round 1: Part 1 (Wrathion, Chen Stormstout & Taran Zhu)

With the pace of WoW going into a bit of a lull right now, as people get burnt out from Siege of Orgrimmar and raiding in general, now’s a good time to catch up on those little things I just couldn’t be bothered doing before. One of these is the Celestial Tournament which I thought I’d write a bit of a guide for how I go about defeating the tournament. I don’t have a lot of store pets, and most of my level 25s are from Pandaria because they were easier to level, so I hope my pet lists are a little more accessible than some of the ones I’ve seen.

In this guide I’ll be focusing on Wrathion, Chen Stormstout and Taran Zhu. At the bottom is a video showing this strategy for all 3 fights.

For pet battling teams, I highly recommend the addon PetBattle Teams, which allows you to make and save pet team configurations (pet move selections, etc). It is a serious time saver if you intend to do weekly and daily quests regularly.

List of pets used:

Swamp Croaker
Scourged Whelpling
Clock’em (Bonkers could work for this too if you don’t want to re-use Clock’em)
Rapana Whelk (just about any snail will do)
Jumping Spider (just about any spider will do that has Brittle Webbing and Leech Life)
Silkbeard Snail (just about any snail will do)
Darkmoon Zeppelin
Kun’lai Runt
Dancing Water Skimmer (most “strider” water pets will do)

About the Celestial Tournament:

The tournament is a personal instance that allows you to compete against a number of difficult trainers to win a Celestial Coin which can be used to purchase some of the celestial pets for your collection. What makes this difficult, however, is that once your pets are defeated, you cannot resurrect them. If you need to heal your pets, you must leave the instance and start over again. This means to defeat the tournament you need to have a wide selection of high level pets and plan your victory using mostly unique pets without doubling up. There is one exception however; healing abilities like Cleansing Rain, Bleat and Inspiring Song can heal some health in battle. So if you wish to re-use a surviving pet from a previous battle, or you make a mistake and wish to start again, you can use a pet with these abilities to heal between serious matches.

The Celestial Tournament is a weekly, account wide quest available from the Celestial Court on Timeless Isle. If you plan to give this a try for the first time, I thoroughly recommend setting aside a few hours to work on your strategy, as it can be very time consuming, but hopefully this guide will save you some time.

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Celestial Tournament Round 2 – Celestial Pets

“You shall face off against the true visages of wisdom, strength, fortitude, and hope – the children of the Celestials themselves! Be warned, they have power and abilities the likes of which have not been seen for generations.”

This guide will be about the 4 Celestial Pets: Xu-Fu, Chi-Chi, Yu’la and Zao, which become available after you have defeated the week’s 3 trainers. All my guides will be based around the strategy for these last 4, preventing there being overlapping defeated pets from other opponents. However, a few pets that need to survive in order to win a battle I may re-use.

To view my other guides on the previous opponents in the tournament:

Wrathion, Chen Stormstout & Taran Zhu
Lorewalker Cho, Dr. Ion Goldbloom & Sully “The Pickle” McLeary (under construction)
Blingtron 4000, Wise Mari & Shademaster Kiryn (under construction)

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Feral Trinkets for LFR, Flexi and Normal

First of all, I think I should explain why I would write a post on this. Recently I was lurking on Icyveins forums, and came across a post on BiS trinkets, specifically about Rune of Re-Origination (LFR). A well-meaning person told the poster that Rune is BiS, even if they have LFR version, and they should therefore keep it. The logic here being that since Heroic Rune is BiS for Heroic geared druids, that LFR Rune must be BiS for LFR geared druids.

Secondly, there are a few great gear guides out there including “BiS” if you can call it that, but they focus on heroic gear, since simming lists for every gear level is impossible.

So after importing my own character, converting my gear to LFR value and simming the trinkets in Catus, I thought, why not pick out the standard gear sets available at LFR, Flexi and Normal levels, and find the BiS trinkets at those levels?

Warning: this will not be a definitive list; it is to give people who don’t know how to sim their character an easy guide to sorting trinkets. If you want accurate results for your personal gear, I highly recommend downloading Catus and importing your own character. (more…)

Tags: Best In Slot, BiS, Dps, Feral Druid, Trinkets

Weekly Rundown

I didn’t do a rundown last week, even though I promised, because I managed to finally finish up my Feral guide to Garrosh and post that, so there didn’t seem much point in an update. I don’t have anything new to add this week, though I have finished study for the year (hooray) so I have no more excuses not to be putting more content on here.

Content you may expect to see shortly:

A rough trinket evaluation based on lower gear levels – should get this out this week, I’ve just been putting it off
A fun flow chart on talents – I have to make sure my brainstorming ideas can actually be achieved through my artistic ability.. kind of an “eyes too big for your stomach” kind of situation.

Current Raiding:

After spending a week wiping to Immerseus (oh the shame), which is meant to be the “easiest” Heroic, and trying strat after strat (and people getting confused), we tried a new strat as a last resort, which was to use the widest platform at the back of the room, with tanks on the platforms to the sides, and running in to tank the adds so DPS could reach. We downed it on the second attempt using this strat, and I know I was at least a little annoyed we hadn’t just tried that strat to start with, because for some reason we decided on our first attempts that we’d move platforms on each tank swap so DPS would have a clear space, but it was the movement that was messing us up especially with adds, and melee trying to move over were getting punted by absolutely everything on the way including adds.

After that we were like “let’s just try Heroic Protectors for lols, see how we go” we got them down on the second night of attempts.

On a related note, I’m tossing up the idea of writing guides for Heroic bosses from Feral PoV – the problem so far is that most of the talent choices and strats are similar to normal, so there’s not really content enough for a post like I have been doing on normals. Plus there’s a few Heroic mode guides and videos out there already. The kind of niche I’ve been able to fill so far is that most people who take the time to write guides or post videos are doing Heroic modes and have probably breezed through Normals without much trouble with any of the mechanics, so the advice they can give the player who is struggling on that content is minimal, whereas since I’m behind on progression this expansion I can write detailed advice on normal content.

Game changes/discussion:

I’m going to leave the majority of discussion on this until there is some more content to really discuss. So far all I’ve seen is the level 90 talents, some of which definitely need some work before they go live, and to be honest feel a little lackluster for level 90 talents.

Other:

That about wraps this up, in the tradition (that I’m starting) of keeping things short and sweet. As always, if you have any thoughts, suggestions, ideas or anything, don’t hesitate to leave a constructive comment below!

Siege of Orgrimmar: Feral DPS – Garrosh Hellscream

Garrosh Hellscream – Siege of Orgrimmar

Welcome to the 5th part of my Feral PoV guide through Siege of Orgrimmar focusing specifically on Garrosh Hellscream.

To see my guide on:

Imerseus, The Fallen Protectors, Norushen & Sha of Pride (1-4) click here
Galakras, Iron Juggernaut, Kor’kron Dark Shaman & General Nazgrim (5-8) click here
Malkorok, Spoils of Pandaria & Thok the Bloodthirsty (9-11) click here
Siegecrafter Blackfuse and Paragons of the Klaxxi (12 & 13) click here.

The following guide is from the point of view of Feral Druid in normal mode SoO 10man. I won’t be going into detail on specific strategies here as that’s what dedicated guides are for.

If no glyph/talent is mentioned, assume it is the generic build (i.e. Cat Form and Savage Roar for glyphs) and talents of your choice. Also, many spec choices are opinion based so if you have a preference (e.g. Feline Swiftness over Wild Charge) do not interpret my recommendation as the end-all of choices! Feedback, advice etc would be greatly appreciated, so don’t hesitate to leave a constructive reply.

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Weekly Rundown

Alright, so I’ve said many times I’m going to do more consistent posts, possibly weekly. Unfortunately, when I make these promises I don’t take into account that I’m a serial procrastinator and that I don’t really think of ideas on schedule. Plus I frequently forget what day it is.
To make this easier on myself I’m going to come up with a simple formula: What my plans are for future blog posts and updates, my current raid experience and achievements, and game changes.

Content you may expect to see shortly:

Currently in the process of writing a specific guide for Garrosh from Feral PoV
A rough trinket evaluation based on lower gear levels
A fun flow chart on talents

Current Raiding:

We managed to finally down Garrosh last week after several unsuccessful nights of attempts, mostly trying to deal with Mind Control closely timed with other mechanics. A messy kill (but aren’t they always?) but by far not our messiest. We put in an extra raid night on Thursday which we previously were using to supplement gear and practice in Flexi, and managed to get him down earlier than usual. So our other two raid nights we spent doing the meta achievement for SoO, which most of us are 1 achievement off which is the 3 parter on Paragons of the Klaxxi, so new mount next week!

Game changes/discussion:

Well.. uh.. there’s an awful lot going right now with the new expansion announced, and to be perfectly honest I haven’t even had the time to go sifting through all the planned updates and changes for feral and everything else. My current study period is finishing up in a few weeks (thank god!), and while the lead up to Christmas is always hectic, I intend to do some special blog posts on Warlords of Draenor content and hopefully try out the beta for the first time (if I can).

Other:

On a side note, this blog has recently reached (and passed) 1,000 hits, which is fantastic! My most popular posts are definitely Feral related guides, so I’ll be sure to provide more useful material for people in the future. If something on this blog has helped you out, it’d be fantastic if you’d sign up for the RSS feed or on Twitter which will announce new blog posts, and pass the link on to anyone you know who may find it interesting.

To keep things short and sweet, and to prevent myself from drafting this post and putting it off for another week, I’m going to leave it at that and post it!

As always, if you have any thoughts, suggestions, ideas or anything, don’t hesitate to leave a constructive comment below!

Siege of Orgrimmar: Feral DPS p.4

Bosses 12 & 13 Siege of Orgrimmar

Welcome to the 4th part of my Feral PoV guide through Siege of Orgrimmar. Bosses covered here are Siegecrafter Blackfuse and Paragons of the Klaxxi.

To see my guide on:

Imerseus, The Fallen Protectors, Norushen & Sha of Pride (1-4) click here

Galakras, Iron Juggernaut, Kor’kron Dark Shaman & General Nazgrim (5-8) click here

Malkorok, Spoils of Pandaria & Thok the Bloodthirsty (9-11) click here

Deviating a little from my usual grouping, I’m not in a position to write a guide on Garrosh yet but expect it to come in the near future.

The following bosses are from the point of view of Feral Druid in normal mode SoO 10man. I won’t be going into detail on specific strategies here as that’s what dedicated guides are for.

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Siege of Orgrimmar: Feral DPS p.3

Bosses 9-11 Siege of Orgrimmar

Welcome to the third part of my Feral PoV guide through Siege of Orgrimmar. Bosses covered here are Malkorok, Spoils of Pandaria and Thok the Bloodthirsty. To see my guide on 1-4, click here or 5-8 click here.

The following bosses are from the point of view of Feral Druid in normal mode SoO 10man. I won’t be going into detail on specific strategies here as that’s what dedicated guides are for.

If no glyph/talent is mentioned, assume it is the generic build (i.e. Cat Form and Savage Roar for glyphs) of your choice. Also, many spec choices are opinion based so if you have a preference (e.g. Feline Swiftness over Wild Charge) do not interpret my recommendation as the end-all of choices! Feedback, advice etc would be greatly appreciated!

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Siege of Orgrimmar: Feral DPS p.2

Bosses 5-8 Siege of Orgrimmar

Welcome to the second part of my Feral PoV guide through Siege of Orgrimmar. Bosses covered here are Galakras, Iron Juggernaut, Kor’Kron Dark Shaman and General Nazgrim. To see my guide on the first 4, click here.

The following bosses are from the point of view of Feral Druid in normal mode SoO 10man. I won’t be going into detail on specific strategies here as that’s what dedicated guides are for.

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Tags: Feral Druid, Feral PoV

Siege of Orgrimmar – Feral DPS p.1

Bosses 1-4 Siege of Orgrimmar

The following bosses are from the point of view of Feral Druid in normal mode SoO 10man. I won’t be going into detail on specific strategies here as that’s what dedicated guides are for.

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