Lathandris on his Red Proto-Drake

Last Saturday night five members of the Order of Copernicus brought a few cases of whoop ass to the 5-man heroic scene!  Unknown to my comrades-in-arms, the hidden agenda of this run was to help me get my last three achievements for Glory of the Hero , which we accomplished along with 9 other achievements.  Our group make-up was the following: Skandanner, the Protection Warrior ; Beeros, the Shadow Priest ; Tyrolen, the Enhancement Shaman ; Sidereal, the Unholy Death Knight; and Lathandris, the Restoration Druid   

The night started out with the daily random, which happened to be Nexus.  In the Nexus we earned the Split Personality  achievement. Not too much to say about this one, as it is fairly easy to accomplish. We just kept the images close to each other and AoEed them down. Next we tackled Chaos Theory , this one was trickier as it required DPS to not kill the Chaotic Rifts, this essentially put a big burden on me as the healer, to keep the party up.  We did not attempt to kite Anomalus, which in retrospect might have been a better strategy, but rather we just faced him down.  I ended up dying, but the rest of the party lived and we earned the achievement.  Seeing as Druids can HoT and run, we should have just kited him so much of the rift damage could have been avoided. Finally, we knocked out Intense Cold .  This achievement is simple for Druids, as the act of shapeshifting frees us from the Ice Nova she casts, but the rest of the party needed a different approach. To help the non-shapeshifters out we had Beeros swap specs to get a quick cast of Mass Dispel . When the frost nova hit, Beeros would free the team and we jumped our way to victory.  

Next up was Old Kingdom and Respect Your Elders .  At first glance this seemed like a tricky achievement as the Guardians make the boss immune to damage, but ended up to be rather simple.  First we had Sidereal, don his Tank Gear and spec.  We started the fight and had Skandanner pull Elder Nadox to the far end of the room. Once the first Guardian popped we had Sidereal grab it and pull it to the other end of the room, getting it just far enough to allow the immunity shield to fall off Nadox. Then all I had to do was make sure Skan and Side got the heals they needed.  On a well geared tank like Sidereal, a single Regrowth cast on him as he was pulling the Guardian away was more than sufficient.  We then moved on to Volunteer Work , another fairly simple achievement and basically amounted to Tank & Spank. The key here was when the “volunteer” is sacrificed Jedoga enrages and deals lots of damage. Between Skandanner’s gear and skills and my rolling HoTs, the team was soon moving on to Volazj’s Quick Demise .  I originally thought that Quick Demise was going to require Tyrolen to use Heroism , but Tyrolen, Sidereal, and Beeros continued to layout epic DPS and poor Volazj went down in a little over a minute, without having to use Heroism .  

Having crushed Old Kingdom we moved on to Azjol-Nerub.  It turned out to be a good thing that we had saved Heroism , as we decided to zerg Kirk’thir to earn Watch Him Die .  The key here was quick DPS aided by Heroism , and HoTing the team up while Tyrolen’s Cleansing Totem kept the poisons at bay.  With Kirk’thir down, we moved on to Hadronox Denied .  This one took us three attempts to get right.  Our first attempt we decided to charge in and quickly DPS down the adds that start the fight and drag them into the tunnel to get Hadronox. This quickly lead to us getting over run by Adds, which healed Hadronox as they died… lame.  For our second attempt Sidereal suggested we attempt to force a restart of the event by using Shadowmeld .  I promptly ran up to the add whacked them and Shadowmelded, death followed soon after as the adds just crushed me.  In our successful attempt, I Moonfired  the adds from a distance and then popped Shadowmeld .  The event restarted and we were left with a precious few seconds to run down the tunnel to Hadronox, free from adds.  Once down, Hadronox met a quick demise of his own.  

Gundrak, where we earned Snakes, Why’d it Have to Be Snakes? , which is pretty much a give me given the average DPS that is put out in Heroics these days.  When then moved on to the Main event in my mind, Less-rabi .  For this Tyrolen spec’ed to reduce his interrupt cooldown. We started the fight normally and had Skandanner take the first interrupt and Sidereal take the second interrupt. Once Moorabi reached 50% health, Tyrolen began to spam his interrupt. With the reduced cooldown, the Shaman interrupt matches the speed of the cooldown on Moorabi’s transformation… this means the interrupt lands precisely on the almost instant cast transformation. We finished up Gundrak with Share The Love .  For this achievement we had Sidereal swap to tank keeping Skandanner as tank and had Beeros swap to Discipline along we me as Restoration.  We started the fight with Skandanner tanking the boss and we slowly DPSed until he transformed into a Rhino.  Once transformed, we stopped DPS and waited for the impales to begin.  As soon as Sidereal was Impaled, he taunted the boss off of Skandanner and Skan join the rest of us in the waiting game.  This was important because he does not impale his tank, so tank swapping allowed for Skandanner to be a viable impale target.  The two healers is to ensure a single healer isn’t impaled and killed, which would lead to a wipe.  

We finished the night off with an abbreviated run of Halls of Stone.  We cut directly to the Tribunal of Age and earned Brann Spankin’ New , which was a freebe achievement and then moved straight to the final boss to bang out Abuse the Ooze .  This achievement requires you to DPS the boss until the slime adds start coming.  The slimes will eventually form into Iron Sludges. Iron Sludges do a good deal of AoE damage and DPS should ensure they don’t live long. Once 5 have been killed the boss can be safely dispatched.  

While I was the only one to earn Glory of the Hero  that night, everyone got a good chunk of the required achievements out of the way. We will probably do another achievement run some time this weekend as Tyrolen is an achievement whore .