Dragons ho!
WotLK brought us the new vehicle system, and a lot of quests where you have to use vehicles, amongst them a bunch of rep dailies. I know some of my guildies are struggling, I certainly was cursing and struggling with some of them. Nowadays I just breeze through, and I thought I’d share my mini-guide on the three worst offenders.
Defending Wyrmrest Temple:
This is probably the easiest of the three quests in this guide, but it can still get frustrating. It’s fairly buggy, so targetting the blue dragons around the temple gets annoying at times, as the dragons are either tapped or you get ‘Target not in line of sight’ errors. The fastest way to get this quest done is to fly out to the Azure Dragonshrine right away. Zoom down into the ley-line in the center, press 5, fly out again. This action alone will have aggro’d a lot of the dragons around the shrine, so be ready to hit 3 for Renew and start breathing fire on the mean blue dragons. Azure Drakes die very easily. One Fireball and one fire DoT and they’re dead. DoT a drake, use the main attack and then switch to another target. Azure Dragons are trickier. They have a lot more health. It will take two breath attacks, plus two DoT durations to kill them. Again, start with the DoT, two fireballs, reapply DoT, move on to the next target. Should you get more than 3-4 dragons on you and your Renew doesn’t keep you up, there’s no shame in using 4 to quickly fly away to safety. It’s less frustrating than being shot from the sky, that’s for sure. I get this quest done in 3-4 minutes, and I am daydreaming of actually getting the 2 minute achievement one fine day.
TLDR Summary: 2, 1 for Azure Drakes, 2, 2×1, 2 for Azure Dragons, 5 at the ley-line. Use 3 and 4 when necessary
Aces High!:
Another Wyrmrest daily, so more dragon action. It’s also training for Malygos phase 3 as you get to control the same dragons there. The first couple times I did this I thought I’d never be able to beat it, but once you follow a specific strategy, it just works. The most important part is that you need to be able to see buffs on your vehicle unit frame. If you don’t you might have a problem. Once that’s settled, this is almost easy. Once you have hopped onto your dragon, press 3 five times for a fully 5-stacked Revivify on your dragon. Then quickly grab the closest dragon by pressing 1 and keep doing this 3-4 times. If you have low latency, even 5 times. Press 2 to use your shiny combo points, then immediately press 3 to keep your 5-stack of Revivify up. The key is that you keep Revivify up, because a fully stacked one will keep you alive. However, keep a close eye on the cast bar of the blue dragons. If you see them cast Arcane Surge and their health is above 50%, press 5 immediately to protect you from massive burst damage.
TLDR Summary: 5×3 then repeat 4×1, 2, 3
Thrusting Hodir’s Spear
Both the coolest and the most frustrating of the vehicle dailies, and the only daily where you can die and get no parachute to safely glide to the ground with when you get knocked from the sky. If you fall, you get to smash on the ground. Next time you see a corpse in Dun Niffelem, feel for them. Btw, this particular part of the guide is dedicated to Niza, one of my guildmates. She gets the giggles whenever I complain that Thrusting Hodir’s Spear is hard. It must be the hormones, after all the horn-blowing and helmet polishing she’s done for the Sons, that she finds this funny 
In this quest a proto-drake picks you up and all that you have is a spear and your hands holding on for dear life to best this drake. The fight against the drake has 2 phases, with two different skillsets to use.
Phase 1: Keep your eye on the grip debuff and never let this get below 30. If it’s below 30, spam it 2-3 times. When Dodge is off its cooldown, use it. When 4 is off cooldown, always use it, it’s your big damage attack. Always use 1 after 4 to get your grip up again. If neither 2 nor 4 are available and your grip is up, spam the hell out of 3. Your goal is to get the drake to 25% health way before it’s flying above Dun Niffelem, the faster the better. The longer it takes, the harder it is to keep your grip up, until grip decays so quickly that it’s impossible to hold on.
Phase 2: Once the drake is at 25% health, he will want to snack on you in its maw, so now you only have two actions available to you. A stackable debuff trying to open the maw of the drake, and Fatal Strike. The more debuffs you have stacked, the higher the chance that your Fatal Strike meets the target. Again, this phase is a race for time, as you will steadily lose health from being chewed on. Spam 1 until you have at least 10 stacks up, press 3, pray it hits, and if not, spam 1 some more while 3 is on its 5 sec cooldown and hope you’ll be alive to try another time.
TLDR Summary: in phase one, press 1 when grip < 30, spam 3, use 2 and 4 every cooldown. In phase 2, spam 1 til you have 10 stacks, 3 until dead. Collect 500 rep and the feeling of being awesome!
I didn’t start in Storm Peaks Zone, but in Aces High i did 5×1,5,3
5x Fireball
1x Shield
1x Heal
repeat til end combat
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I hated Aces High, almost as much as I hated Troll Patrol. Sounds like I am going to hate Spear too. I am not sold on the vehicle system. It seems to be extra bad when a dragon is involved.
I guess I should figure out how to enable buffs on my UI….
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If you think that is bad – I went into Malygos fight with zero experience for the dragons and in phase 3 your on dragons… Yay! But that’ll help me when I start to do those dailies. I want to get the achivemnt
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Thanks for a great writeup. I’m trying to encourage my guildies to do Aces High in practice for Malygos. The quest giver even lets you do practice runs whenever you like – it’s there for a reason!
Personally i’ve enjoyed all of these dragon vehicle mechanics, and have gradually learned to master them.
Oh – you didnt mention occulus! Good luck in there. A lot of people I’ve played with took a long time to get the hang of it in heroic – multiple wipes till we went with very confident players. I dont want to repeat this experience on Malygos.
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admin Reply:
January 9th, 2009 at 8:25 am
I’ve only done Oculus on normal, and I wasn’t a fan. But that’s mostly because having all melee DPS on Mage-Lord Urom turned out to be a nightmare to heal. I hear Eregos is a lot harder to beat on heroic, but my group did fine on him.
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I have tried this myself yet, but in Defending Wyrmrest Temple, couldn’t you get a couple of party members to do it together?
With 4-5 players, you all could finish that quest splickity split.
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admin Reply:
January 9th, 2009 at 8:24 am
Sure you can, but if you’re going for the achievement, it specifically states you may not be in a party and you have to complete it in 2 minutes. Very hard, IMHO.
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Mojin/Hawksong Reply:
January 9th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
You can’t be in a group, but that doesn’t mean you have to kill all of the dragons by yourself. *wink*
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<3 Kadomi!
I’m going to give Aces High another try now. Thanks.
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For the SoH daily, use dodge when you see the emote that the dragon is going to bite, that is when you will dodge the attack. That way you will have more health for phase two, which means you can stack the debuff higher and have less chance you will miss.
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I find Aces High! the hardest of these three, by a country mile, perhaps its because I cannot see buffs on my UI, anyhow, I haven’t been able to complete it yet, and got so frustrated that I had to leave it!
Not been able to do the achievement for Defending Wyrmrest yet, although hopefully will one of these days, other that that its easy enough!
Same with Thrusting Hodir’s Spear, once you figure out how to do it it’s not so bad! I spam grip, and hit the big spear hit when I can, if I can dodge a claw strike then great, if not it doesn’t normally matter that much! Also, on stage 2 I rarely stack the debuff more than x3 before trying the fatal strike, if it fails a couple more debuffs and try again! A good tip for this quest, particularly while learning it, is to go to Frosthold and turn in some of your Relics of Ulduar for some Snowfall Ale, which you can drink if the Wyrm drops you and you’ll float to the groud
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admin Reply:
January 9th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I’m greedily hoarding my relics to turn them in for Sons rep when the patch comes. At least that was the plan, but I think I’ll actually be Exalted before the patch comes, heh.
I think the design of Aces High! is a bit fail, because without being able to see the Revivify stacks, it’s like doing this quest blindly. If you’re using Pitbull, try enabling pet auras just so you can see it, and it will be easy.
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^ Same here
got almost 200 now though, so I find that the 2 for the snowfall ale is well worth it when it saves a hefty repair bill!
Not sure what I need to do with my UI, I don’t use Pitbull, just need to have a tinker an see what I can do! Only reason to do it is training for Malygos, although I am so far off that atm, that its not a priority! lol
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Defending Wyrmrest Temple 2 minute achievement is a lot of luck. When I completed it, I flew straight to the shrine using the dragon boost and got that part of the way.
After that, you have to hope there is 5 Drakes and 3 Dragons on the way back, so you don’t have to fly around much trying to find them. Finding some at low hp from fighting the npc Dragons also helps a ton.
When I completed it, I had 2 seconds left on the clock and had the best possible spawns I could have gotten. Good Luck on that one. I would suggest pulling out the tracker and if you aren’t going to make it, just abandon the quest and retry.
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In order to buff my Wyrmrest rep, I spent a lot of time with the Defending daily, so nabbed the achievement on two characters. When you go for it, keep a few things in mind:
1) Don’t do the quest in primetime. I do some dailies before work in the morning to help me wake up, and the lack of competition is important. 2) There’s a 2 sec CD on your nuke, which allows you to fit an instant after a nuke. Instead of DoTing before nuking, nuke a dragon, then apply the dot or renew as necessary. 3) You can move as you cast any spell. Be on the move to the next dragon. 4) The dragons will evade if you don’t fight them long enough, so it’s okay to constantly switch targets as you move closer to the dragonshrine and back. 5) I always had trouble finding enough smalls. There are almost always two smalls chilling just north and above the shrine. I typically grab those and kite/kill them as I make my way back to the Temple.
Hope the advice helps! There’s a lot of luck involved in getting the achievement. Sometimes the blues line up so you can fight two at a time for the entire duration, and sometimes they come at you in a pack of five. There isn’t much to do in the latter situation except run away and try again the next day.
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admin Reply:
January 9th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
That is fantastic advice, Xtian, thank you so much!
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For the SoH daily, do not use 2 until you see the emote that the dragon is going to claw you. You waste your precious grip by using 2 too often.
Also, if you are having trouble with this daily, I suggest that if you’re an engineer, put on your parachute cloak(you should have made one a LONG time ago!). If you aren’t an engineer, you can always pick up one of the Shatari Skyguard cloaks if you have the rep. I’ve gotten pretty good at this daily, but I still wear the cloak just in case, because there is a bug on this quest where sometimes your grip won’t increase when you use it.
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Hodir’s spear was a pain in the butt. It would take me 2 or 3 attempts even after I had done it for 2 weeks. I was so happy to get my exalted shoulder enchant and be done with those dailies.
For Aces High I use a rotation of attack x5, Shield, Heal x2. Repeat. I never die and often stay at 100% health. I’m already exalted with Wyrmcrest so I just do the daily every now and then for the extra gold.
You should add Razuvious to your list. Boneshield, Taunt, Auto attack, blood strike (i think that’s what its called) over and over. It’s a simple fight but one that takes a few tries to get it down. Taunting before Boneshield is a bad mistake I’ve seen happen.
Tankette´s last blog post..Naxx, Naxx and more Naxx
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