Heya guys!!  So, I’ve been having a blast in WoW for the first time since I entered Naxx10 the first week of LK raiding.  Literally, since that first week.  Heh. 

So what do we have in store today?  Tons.  We’re going to talk about the specs I’ve been using in WoW atm, the roles I’ve played, the kills, the wipes, the totally EPIC FAIL moments, the site, and all kinds of stuff.  So lets dive right in eh? 

SJ’s Raid Specs

So atm I’m double Unholy spec.  One is Raid PvE DPS, and the other is Raid PvE Tank.  We’ve had some minor tank availability issues of late, so I’ve been pitching in like a good lil Death Knight.  Awww… 

The DPS spec is straight like before in my other post, 12/0/59.  Now for my tank spec I swapped a few things around.  I dropped two points from Bladed Armor, and another 3 points from Ravenous Dead.  I then brought Necrosis up to 2/5, Blood-Caked Blade to 3/3, and filled out Improved Unholy Presence to 2/2. 

Is that the best thing to do for an AoE Tank spec?  I’m not 100% sure, but it honestly looked like a better spec to me at the time.  You will also notice that I subbed the Glyph of Rune Strike out for a Glyph of Death and Decay.  Since I was doing a lot of add tanking, I wanted to up my AoE threat.  See what I meant now when I said you need to alter your specs based upon your role? 

Since my Armory is almost always up as DPS I’m not going to bother with those stats, but as a side note you can peek at my tank stats here with an amazing DPS note for AoE Unholy Tanks.

That’s right 3400 DPS as a tank in full tank gear.  Crazy, I know.  It was on a wipe, which is mainly why I’m so high on the DPS meter.  But sustaining 3k+ DPS with adds was very simple to do really between Pestilence’d diseases, Death and Decay, Unholy Blight, and Blood Boil.  BOOM FTW!!!   

My tank gear is not the best out there, mainly offspec pieces I picked up in the process of farming Tier 7 content.  But it’s still solid.  Fully buffed I sit at about 50% avoidance, 32k armor, 41k HP, 128 Hit Rating, 15 Expertise, and 4k+ AP.  There are far better tank gear builds out there, but this one gets the job done.  Ultimately I would still recommend Frost for a MT build, but Unholy is amazing for OT’ing.

Ulduar Kill Shots!!

So, what’s this?!?  Screenshot loving with footnotes, heh.

Deadly Boss Mods

Now these numbers are a little bit inaccurate.  For example in the first pic it lists Iron Council with 2 kills and 2 wipes.  It counts each boss as a kill.  I died on the 3rd boss, so it’d didn’t credit it.  Also on the 3rd kill it shows Hodir as 0 kills and 2 wipes because I died on the encounter we got the kill.  So if you ever go back and use DBM for checking stats, be aware of the fact that it records numbers based of whether you lived or died, not the boss necessarily.

Auriaya

High King Maulgar anyone?  OMFG!!  This boss was the most difficult we’ve done so far simply because the pull is obnoxious.  Just like HKM from Gruul’s Lair in BC, this encounter is ALL about the pull.  Don’t do the pull perfectly and you’re dead.  In fact the 15th pull was the only correctly done pull.  So the 15th time was the time we actually lasted past the first 20 seconds.  And what happened?  Insta kill.  So yeah, once you get the pull down this fight is flipping easy mode.

Hodir

Really easy fight so long as everyone does what they are supposed to do, and one of the more enjoyable ones imo.  1 wipe then a kill.  I’m not sure which NPC buffs I got through the raid for dps, but I was able to rock out 6300 dps here as Unholy.  And on top of that we got the achievement for not letting any NPC’s die!!

Iron Council

ZOMG LEGENDARIES!!!  WOOT!!!  Pimp that !@#$ out Herugrim!!    Just like Hodir, 1 wipe then a kill.

Kologan

Totally one of the best deaths I’ve ever seen!!  You walk over his dead cold corpse to get where you’re going!!  Pure win there!!  So this fight took a few tries to get it down.  6 wipes and 1 kill.  Basically it was about the minor details.  There are odd positions melee cannot actually hit the arms (read buggy still Blizzard), paths to run from eyebeams without running into Rubble packs and eating AoE death, healers getting a feel for the fight, etc… 

Though the one epic fail moment was AWESOME, LOL!!!  Everyone was laughing, even the healers rofl.  The MT ran in and none of the healers landed a heal in time.  So like the tank ran in, fell over dead, looked at me funny, and game over lmao.  It was pretty f’ing hysterical, heh. 

Rocked out number 1 DPS with 5600 DPS though the numbers are odd really.  I spent some time running (to Rubble or from eyebeams), repositioning my pet (can only hit the boss if you park him in the right spot first, and he will never hit the arms it seems), but was also spreading diseases on the Arms and Body.

Razorscale

This was one of three encounters that I tanked (Razorscale, Auriaya, and Freya).  Overall it was pretty damn fun picking up a crap ton of adds and just AoE’ing the beejezus out of them!! 

3 wipes and 1 kill is all it took to get this fight down, and on top of that we nailed down another Achievement baby!!  Holla!!  Heh.

XT-002

Enter Epic Fail moment of the week.  OMFG…

OK, so we wiped on this guy for over 2 hours for 15 wipes.  And its not like we had deaths in the first minute of a fight either.  Full fights to the enrage timer every single damn time.  Grumble…  So what went wrong?  US!!!

Someone in vent said that the “heart” was not to be dps’d because it was only for Heroic mode.  No one…NO ONE…remembers who said it.  But we all remember it being said in Ventrilo.  Basically we were throwing away 40%+ of our dps every fight because when the heart would come out we’d ignore it doing zero DPS.  /facepalm  Inorite?!!?  LOL

So anyways we’re discussing what we can do to change stuff and max out DPS.  And we got damn good at it too.  Even got the lil creepy bugger down to like 24% one time without ever hitting the heart once.  Till someone windowed out finally and found a site saying to DPS the crap out of the heart…  >.<  So yeah.  We dps’d the heart the next time and he died.  GG Sleepless Knights, lol.  We felt like such dorks, heh.

But, at least it paid out.  LEGENDARIES ZOMG!!!  Grats again Herugrim, 2 fragments now!! 

Ulduar Achievements

The really awesome part about Achievements is when you get them and you never even tried for them!!

• Hodir:  Kept all of the NPC’s alive
• Razorscale:  Killed him without letting him fly into the air more than once
• XT-002:  Defeat him without letting any raid member die to a Gravity Bomb

Pretty damn cool!! 

Flame Leviathan, Freya, and Ignus

So lets talk about what I do not have screen shots for eh?  FL was stupid easy mode.  One shot right out the gates.  But Ignus…sigh.  Again, epic fail.  No one found one of the bugged boss threads until after we spent 2 hours on this dude.  So we sat there the first evening wiping, and wiping, and wiping on a boss we couldn’t kill.  It was very frustrating to say the least.  Since that first night we’ve pushed him off for now.

As to Freya, we got in 6 wipes before we had to call the raid.  Honestly we had her on one try practically.  Just a lil bad luck combined with one or two people making a mistake when it mattered.  It was so late by the 6th wipe however that we had to call it.  So I have no doubt in my mind however that we’ll drop her this evening.  Once your dps learns how to coordinate the kills, everything just falls into place.

Looking for Raid Strats and Details?

May I recommend these two links.  They’ve been my primary “go to” resource for Ulduar.

• MMO Champion – Ulduar
• Strat Fu – Ulduar

Almost Forgot…

Invariably some super observant reader (read sarcasm) sees my UI and mod layout and asks 2 questions.  Rephrase, these are the two questions someone ALWAYS asks.

1. Rune Mod and Disease Timer:  Rune Watch
2. Bars and Buff Window:  CT Mod

FYI, I have most of the mods I personally use linked on the right side of the blog.  They’re there for a reason.    Heh.

New Readers

There’s a lot of you guys coming here to SJ now, so I’m sure many of you are wondering what kind of a site this is.  And who the hell is Skeleton Jack anyways?!?!?

I played Elorien (Night Elf Warrior) as my main in vanilla WoW.  I was a Fury warrior at heart, but spent all of my time in raids as Prot MT’ing through MC, BWL, AQ20, ZG, and the first half of AQ40 (though once I joined SK I did get to see all of AQ40 start to finish).  I even got to be a Fury warrior in Telepug for the Spider Wing of Naxx.  Elorien still has an Ashkandi and full T2 Wrath in the bank, heh.

While I started BC with Elorien as my main (even did a server first kill or two in T5 content as MT), I swapped over to Bigeasy the Elemental Shaman.  I got more heavily into PvP this time around though.  So I PvE’d as Elemental and PvP’d as Enhancement.  Bigeasy was a full Sunwell Elemental Shaman, and we killed every boss in Sunwell (including Muru) before the big 3.0 nerf to bosses hit except for KJ.  We only killed KJ after the big nerf, sigh.

And now I play Skeletonjack, a Night Elf Death Knight with this crazy lil blog.  I am a member of the guild Sleepless Knights of Bronzebeard server US, and I like writing obviously.  This site is dedicated to DK’s, though I do go off topic from time to time a lil bit. 

Sometimes I do talk about other blogs, my friends, or even my cat Shadow (whom I love to death!!).  I’ve got some pretty damn funny Epic Fail posts and some good Fun posts as well if you wanna go check them out.  I always recommend checking out my post:  Nerdy Girls?  /WIN  You can even find cool pics like this one:

And then again you can find posts where I detail in depth spec breakdowns, best in slot items, or how to’s on required skills like Hit and Expertise.  We’ve got a lil bit of everything here over at SJ!! 

Spec Breakdowns

Now for those newer readers who did not go back and read old posts to figure out what is going on, I’m not done with these specs by a long shot.  Any one post about a spec is greatly detailed and covers a lot of side options.  But it also requires a lot more work.  And there was not enough time for everything.  You can check this old Blood Disease-less post for an example of what I mean.

So don’t worry.  All of these questions people are asking in comments here on the site will be answered.  I’ve got everything coming.  Just it takes some time, and also I want to see what people are reporting in Live Raids instead of relying on PTR testing for everything.  You know?

Cancer

For those longer term readers you will hopefully remember me talking about this. 

A friend of mine that I met in game has an amazing daughter.  Her name is Eleanor.  She is 5 years old and sweet as can be.  I’ve listened to her ramble on before telling her mom about all kinds of things.  And it breaks my heart just thinking about everything that their family is suffering through.

Eleanor has cancer.  And it’s the bad kind in it’s last phase.  They?ve been forced to resort the last and final treatment, killing all of her bone cells with Chemo entirely.  It’s a bad bad bad thing for a child to have to go through.

I will be holding a raffle for 10,000g for any server that you play on, so long as it is a US server.  I apologize to my EU cousins, but I don’t have gold on EU servers to offer as a prize.    If we collect at least $5,000 in donations I will increase the prize to 20,000g.  If we collect at least $10,000 I will get you 20,000g and also 1 years worth of paid subscription to WoW with game cards.  And if we break $20k…well I’ll be giving thanks and figuring out some kind of a bonus if that could actually happen.  Possibly runner up prizes, etc?

This is a donation only.  And it’s to a good cause.  The prizes are only a free raffle you’ll be entered into for donating to a non-profit cause.  And this will be done through PayPal.  I’ve put this off because I am hoping for maximum exposure.  And since people come back to WoW at major patch releases, and the minor patches always bump my hit count from around 6k to closer to 10k people a day…I’ve decided to hold back on this until 3.1 so I can hopefully help out lil Eleanor as much as possible.

Eleanor is getting Chemo treatment as you read this.  She is in the hospital right now.  And she doesn’t deserve this.  Her mom should be getting me the finalized bank info tomorrow evening.  So within the next few days expect to see something about this.

If you care to learn more about Eleanor, her parents set up a Blog to keep friends and family updated with details:  Click here for Ela’s Blog!!

Also if you wish to see what she looks like, she is actually in a commercial for Seattle Children’s Hospital here at this LINK.  If you watch the 60 second commercial:  Anthem – 60 second TV, and go to 20 seconds in you will see a little angel riding a tricycle while her dad (off screen) is running with her to keep her IV stand close enough so she can actually do something so simple as to ride a trike.  When was the last time you saw a child have to have an adult run with them carrying medical equipment just so they could enjoy something so simple? 

-Suffer Well Brothers and Sisters.

Tags: Raids, Specs