Icecrown Citadel.

Took a short time-out to gear up my hunter to get in my first ICC 25-man. I’d say it went pretty good. We cleared the first instance, and I only died twice. Once from a spirit kill on the second boss, and once in the gunship battle. And the gunship battle was done on heroic level. No phat loot though, for my part. Second boss dropped the longbow, and I rolled a whooping 14 for it.

Now, back to business.

Reader John commented that the “Ironman Challenge” was originally intended for level 80’s. And rightly so. But where’s the fun in that? I could take my pally into deadmines, ragefire chasm, and kill every single thing in there. But where’s the “challenge” part? You’re basically boring yourself to tears for the 15-58 stretch of dungeons, I guess. It’s not until after that it starts to become interesting.

No, I want to take Largo from being a lowly level 18 warrior, up to 80, and then gear him up without using emblems. And see how far it gets me. At some point, I guess I will start spending those badges, but let’s see how far I can go with this.

The longer the better, I suppose. I really want to keep this blog alive.

Any questions or comments, like Johns, are always appreciated. I’ll try to answer every single one. Maybe not in a post, but I thought this one deserved an answer like this.

Thanks for reading. Watch out for me in the PUGs. 😉

Stockades.

Well, we’re still busting our asses working on the apartment, but I did get in a quick run of the Stockades. It was my first time in, and as usual, the group members were a larger issue than my gear.

The tank was a level 29 paladin in awful gear. I mean, worse than mine. With cloth pieces thrown in here and there. Died on the very first pull. A part of me was wondering if this tank had decided to do the same Ironman Challenge as me. If so, that was a bad move. An undergeared DPS, yeah, you can get away with that? An undergeared tank wearing cloth? And no shield? Sorry, that’s not going to cut it even in vanilla dungeons. Not even in stockades, and that’s saying something.

We had to boot the tank once again, and we got another one. By then the rest of the group members had decided that they were all tanks, so they didn’t bother with following the new guy’s directions very much. A messy run, but at least I got the boss down. No equipment drops for me in this one though, and my level might be a problem soon. I’m getting into pretty high dungeons now, and I’m still in crap gear. This might be harder than expected. Hopefully it’ll work out though.

Anyway, here’s the screenshot of today’s kill.

First fail.

Well, today’s run was the first big fat greek fail.

It’s really got nothing to do with greeks. I just feel a need to add that whenever I say “big fat”. And this run was very… greek.

I only had time for one run today, because me and my girlfriend are moving in a month, and today we’ve had to empty out the shelves and pack everything into bags. The couple we’ve been subletting from have decided to sell the apartment, which suits us fine, since we are signing a contract for our very own apartment on thursday morning. But they’ve decided to get some homestyling to make some extra cash, and the homestylers have ordered some furniture to be thrown out of the apartment. We’ve been working all day, and were finally done once they arrived. Now we’re living in boxes for a couple of weeks.

Anyway, the run was a complete fail from the start. I got into Blackfathom Deeps, and from the looks of it, our mage was tanking it. He sure pulled aggro from everything he could. And made sure to mention he had a level 45 draenei warrior. I don’t know why. Probably some kind of information service. Very kind of him.

The tank tried, but wasn’t able to keep aggro for his life. I don’t have much to complain about with regard to him – he tried his best, it wasn’t enough. But at least he tried.

The first healer went offline and had to be booted. The second healer seemed to think he was on world explorer challenge, because he seemed to run over every inch of the dungeon he could get to. He would’ve been better off healing. But nooo – running around and pulling extra adds seemed to be more his melody. All the while, the tank is trying to kill stuff, the mage is tanking and yelling for heals (on him of course, not the tank), while a poor DPS paladin is trying to keep everyone topped off while everything is falling apart around him. Myself, I’m softly hitting my head against the desk.

I swear, this challenge sometimes doesn’t seem like so much a challenge of only finding gear in the dungeons, as it seems to be about finding a functioning group in the dungeons. Skill over gear? Heck yeah!

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the last wipe before I decided to pull out.

Shadowfang keep down.

I usually don’t spend time playing WoW during the weekends, if you wonder why there weren’t any updates.  I spend that time with my girlfriend, meeting friends, and at times – working. Yeah, I know. Shocker.

Today, I was back to gaming. I had two unlucky runs, that fortunately ended well. The first, another run through deadmines, was unlucky because we ended up with a tank who didn’t know how to tank, and needed on everything. Completely horrible. I’m still in my DPS spec, but pretty much anyone can tank one of these runs, so I went into defensive stance and started tanking instead. I got us past the giant ogre, and then we were finally able to boot the “tank”. We got another guy who knew what he was doing, and it was a breeze from there. I picked up a pair of mail leggings and a mail belt.

The second run was Shadowfang Keep, which is the only new dungeon I cleared today. It also started off bad with a DPS dropping group right after having needed on an item on the first boss. Instead, we got a huntard – and I don’t use that term lightly, because I like playing my hunter. But this guy needed on everything, including greens, and refused to give it to someone who could actually use it.

So we pulled a pack of Worgen and let them chew on his face after he had done it three times.

From there on, it was smooth sailing. We cleaned house, and Arugal went down like a charm. Here’s the screenshot:

Deadmines and Ragefire Chasm

Ok, Largo is off to a pretty good start!

I started out with a naked Deadmines run, using only the mace I’d gotten from that first kill I mentioned in the first post. And I had two cloth items as well – trousers and shoes. I decided on running Deadmines first because I had quests to do in there, which I wouldn’t have in Ragefire. Also, I’m more used to running Deadmines and know my role in there.

I’ve created a macro that lets people know as soon as I enter the dungeon that I’m doing an Ironman run and that while I lack gear, I’m still decently competent and won’t cause any problems. Needless to say, the others wanted to kick me from the run immediately. 🙂

Fortunately, they can’t kick you for the first five minutes, so I had five minutes to get them on my side. And when they realized I wasn’t dying, and was actually doing better DPS than the rogue, they let me stay. We actually had a very smooth run with a good NE druid as tank, nobody died, and the only one who was considered for kicking was the rogue, who lived up to his class and rolled need on as much as he could. Moron.

Because of him, I didn’t get a lot of stuff that I could use. I did manage to lay my hands on a Raider’s Chestpiece of the Bear, and Raider’s Boots of Stamina, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. I also picked up “gray” items – Burnished Pauldrons and Worn Mail Gloves, but I won’t bother linking them here.

Ragefire Chasm was easy – straight for the final boss, and took him out. Between the two dungeons and some quests I could hand in, Largo is now a level 20 warrior.

Here are the pictures to prove the successful runs:

Deadmines:

Ragefire Chasm

The Ironman Challenge.

Hi!

I’ve decided to create a blog for my “Ironman Run” in World of Warcraft, so anyone can follow my adventures.

The “Ironman Run” is a challenge to complete all dungeons in World of Warcraft, by only using equipment that you find in the dungeons while you run them.

So, for my first dungeon, I’ll have to start naked, and then get gear as it drops in the dungeon.

Before starting this blog, I did one short test run in Deadmines. I had to pull out shortly after the first boss, but his mace dropped, so at least I can use that now.

Other than that, I’m only wearing cloth pants and shoes that I found in the same run. Here’s a screenshot of what my character currently looks like. He’s named Largo, and he’s a level 18 Draenei warrior. I decided on a warrior because I already have a paladin and a death knight at lvl 80, and I wanted a character that can eventually tank his dungeon runs so it will be smoother to get in all those dungeons.