Deck Construction on WoW Insider

You may or may not be sick of Hearthstone already. Or maybe you want to learn a little more about the game. I wrote a lengthy post on WoW Insider about Deck Construction basics. Don’t expect to pull out any turn one wins. But it’ll at least help get you started with the game and assembling a solid deck to work with.

We managed to push Tortos down to about 25% earlier tonight on hard mode. I think we can get him killed on Monday. This is a high intense focus fight, that’s for sure. So many right things are depending on a small number of people. The kiting tank needs to make sure he stays ahead of everyone. The kickers have to be on the ball. Every player needs to ensure that they hit the crystal to activate the shield when they’re at full health. So many things can possibly go wrong. I’m happy that we received an extension on the patch though. With it debuting early September, it gives us a little more time in clearing out some additional hard modes.

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Heroic Council Down!

hcouncil

Here at Conquest, we have a habit of making our own hard modes. We’ll often ace (or get a boss down reasonably quick) before wiping on trash due to overconfidence. We had just finished Heroic Horridon the other week and we had some time left in the raid. Why not make a push for Heroic Council and see what we can do with almost no homework or preparation?

Our raid group pushed further than expected and the call was made to start prepping for him next day because it seemed like the entire council of trolls was within striking range. So with a little over two and a half nights of progress, we managed to get him last night. Arguably the hardest part of the encounter was not dying to Kazrajin. The Blanka look-alike kept doing us in towards the end until we were able to carefully balance our DPS and healing to live just long enough. Our main DPS focused on Sul first so that we wouldn’t have to worry about Sandstorm. We ended up with around 2 or 3 Kazra Empowered phases. We managed to push the remaining trolls to under 10% before mercilessly cutting them all down.

Heroic Council is supposed to be a boss a raid group works on later in the progression. Something like 8th or 9th. But what the hell, we did it backwards. In theory, this would suggest that we have the DPS and healing capacity to get through the other easier bosses. Right now we’re just aiming for kills more than gear especially since we have such a limited window before the expected 5.4 release.

I’ve outlined a new schedule that’s going to include Flex raiding into the works. We’ll still be raiding Mon, Tuesday, and Thursday. But Wednesday night will be an optional Flex raiding night. Any regular raider that didn’t raid because of group composition or attendance related issues can come and step in for that. This way, those players won’t fall too far behind in terms of gearing and experience. I anticipate that the first few opening weeks will be chock full of players on their mains and once they no longer need the gear out of there, they’ll switch to either their alts or opt out allowing me to start bringing in other friends and players who want to see the content without the fuss of LFR.

How’s your guild doing in preparing for the patch? We’ve been doing our best to continue stockpiling gold and mats. Our forums are thriving with raid strategy, discussion, and videos.

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Hearthstone!

Like several other members of the WoW media and press fansites, I received an invite into the Hearthstone beta for the weekend. And it is a blast. It can be crazy addicting. Actually, the addicting part I find is just opening boosters and packs (and that’s going to be a problem for a future Hearthaholic).

I’ve played CCGs for many years. I started playing Magic: the Gathering around 1994. My first set was 4th edition and gradually played on and off throughout the years. Was never much of a deck builder though. This card flopper preferred piloting instead of construction. During two headed giant or 3v3 tournaments, I let my friends put together decks and I just played whatever they gave me. I specialized in playing control decks but shifted to aggressive creature based decks.

I’ve unlocked all the basic cards for Priests, Hunters, Mages, and am working on a Paladin right now.

The following deck is a fun list I put together designed to live long enough to go straight for the opponent’s dome. It’s not meant to be super competitive or to be used in ranked play. Not without significant tweaks.

Deathmage

Every card is designed to go straight to the opponents head, protect my head, or draw more cards. I could probably tune it better. Maybe take a closer look at the Frost spells. I didn’t realize I could freeze opponents directly.

Anyway, I’ll post some more deck ideas and lists that I come across. I’ve encountered some neat and potent ones. Right now, hunter decks are extremely powerful. But more details on that in a different post!

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Halfway Through Summer

Guild still alive?

Raids are firing?

Congratulations! We’re halfway through the summer before school comes back and everyone returns from vacation (yay). This is one of the most brutal summer raiding tiers for us but we’ve been fortunate. Certain players were granted the ability to switch roles and characters which helped keep us afloat. Right now we’re looking to add an additional DPS/tank hybrid (of the plate variety). Our latest kill was heroic Horrion (two weeks ago) and we’ve set our sights now on Tortos. With our best attempt at a little under 50%, we’re poised to crack his shell sometime this week.

I really want to see a return to winged raids though. Mists consisted largely of linear raids. Our raids were cut short tonight because of the absence of a third tank. Even though we can power through Jin’rokh, we’re not in position to two tank heroic Horridon right now which means we’ve lost a day of raiding. It would be nice to have the option to move around and jump ahead to a different boss that we can logistically work on with two tanks. I suppose it’s possible to bypass Horridon on normal mode but that means giving up 6 items plus whatever coin rolls and our goal is to equip our players with gear that will set us up for Siege of Orgrimmar.

Rather not though.

In other news, I’ve reached 90 on my Paladin and decided to try my hand at tanking for the first time ever.

What Matt learned while tanking

  • I see nothing but boss crotch all day, everyday.
  • Threat gets ripped like nobody’s business.
  • AoE tanking can be a cluster.
  • I can’t heal myself while I’m tanking.
  • I can’t tank more than 45 mobs at the same time in a mash of green and blue gear.
  • Queues are really instant. Faster than my healing queues.
  • If a pet taunts, I’m not taking it back because they’re generous enough to distribute the load.
  • Don’t bubble with low health.
  • People really do single target DPS on different mobs.
  • I would die of a heart attack if I tried to tank a raid.

Yeah. I mean it’s fun with people you know. I’m absolutely certain my guild gets a kick out of hearing me scream and shout when I tank. But oh man. I can’t believe I’m going to use this character and tank for flex raids.

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[VIDEO] Immerseus on Flex Mode

I took the liberty of running the Flex Mode version of Immerseus over the weekend. Did manage to kill it within a few attempts. Our gear was scaled to 506 item level. Our group consisted of 10 players so we didn’t get a chance to check out the dynamic scaling in action. Players that are deep in the normal mode of Throne of Thunder shouldn’t have much difficulty with this boss. Check out the video and make note of the healing tips.

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