We spent most of last night wiping on those damn Jormungar in the new 10 man raid. Gormok was ridiculously easy after a few shots – chasing Snobolds down quickly became routine. We just couldn’t get the Jormungar down. That fight has got to be a prime example of where 10 mans are more difficult than 25 mans – if someone dies, which is very likely to happen, then your entire attempt is pretty much doomed. Guh.

I’ve kind of lost steam on Ilthiran – not really that interested in playing him right now. In fact, I’d say after that brief period of revival, I’m kind of bored of WoW again. –shrug- Anyway, I did manage to get to level 71, and thus, Swift Flight Form;

I also managed to finish the Nexus – we had absolutely zero problems this time, so, ha, suck it, Kyp, it was totally the healers fault last time!

Faulsey received a brief revival as well. He had 26 Emblems of Heroism, which were just sitting there, annoying me, so I ran a few HCs to get up to 40 EoH and 200 SKS, to spend on an heirloom chest and shoulders for my Paladin – he’d previously been using some mail shoulders.

Logging onto said Paladin, I had a case of “hey, I should have read the patch notes” when I noticed that A. My Judgements were returning a flat 8% of my Base Mana when cast, despite there being nothing in the tooltip to suggest they would do so, and B. Hand of Reckoning now does ridiculous damage if used to pull a target. Geez, as if leveling Ret Paladin’s had to be even more powerful! –grin-

And random cool screenshots:

(So Algalon is kind of old news by now – I’d never seen this, and didn’t expect any of the scrubs on my server to have been able to take him out!)

Play this. (No need to watch, just a static image.)

If you try to deny that that is one of the most fantastic pieces of Boss music in gaming history, I… well… there’s just no helping you, ok?

And speaking of Razorscale..!

Popped onto Ellaria tonight, just to check and see of the Razormaw Matriarch was up – I want a raptor for her, too! – and I asked my guild how raiding was going, since I haven’t really been keeping up with their progress (sorry guys!)

Kyp: Actually, we’re one DPS short for Ulduar tonight…
Me: Orly? –whistles nonchalantly-
Kyp invites you to join a group.

Bwahah. Since it was the last night before the reset, they’d already done a number of Bosses in the place. First we did Razorscale, as you can see above, and then moved onto Auriaya, who I’d never fought before. We wiped the first time, but beat her with ease the second time. Unfortunately, the crazy lady didn’t drop the shoulders I’d have liked. Bah!

Now all I’m missing from the Antechamber is the Iron Council… maybe one day. We attempted Freya after that, but, I dunno, Freya is just one massive drug trip. QUICK, HIDE UNDER THE MUSHROOMS, NO, NOT THE SMALL ONES, THE BIG ONES, AND OMG THERE’S A HEALING TREE, KILL IT, NOW A GIANT PLANT AND SOME ELEMENTALS HAVE SPAWNED WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON OH WE’RE DEAD. I believe they’ve downed her before, but a couple of the DPS were having latency issues, plus me and another person had never done the fight, so we were destroyed.

And for Stop – Look! It’s a genuine, honest to Eonar, Female Dwarf!

After that, I gave the new 5 man instance a try for the first time – me and Kazura had actually joined a party for it a few nights ago, but it didn’t go anywhere at all. We tried again tonight, and I was healing… Man, that place is rather hard to heal. The last boss is insane. He ate our faces first attempt, and second attempt it was very close. I kind of just hit chain heal over and over, hoping people wouldn’t die. For a 5 man, that is absolutely ridiculous. (Still not as bad as HC Old Kingdom. HATEHATEHATE.)

Mostly thanks to the free emblems on the mini-bosses before Freya, I had enough to get a delicious set of leg armour. Mmm, finally “naturally” at the spell hit cap. Course, I don’t raid much, but damnit, it’s the principle of the thing.

And why yes, yes I am totally on a WoW kick again now that I’ve got plenty of free time and nothing to do with it. What’s your point?

Yes, t’is true! This is a post! It’s about WoW! And something I did in it! EGADS!

Logged on tonight, about half 12, just to check my Emblem count, to see if I would be set just to pop on and grab the Heirloom chest piece when the patch goes live on EU servers tomorrow. I’m immediately asked by a guildy if I want to do Flame Leviathan.

I think, eh, what’s the harm. I may be a bit rusty, but it’s only Flame Leviathan. So we trundle on through the gauntlet, and reduce Leviathan to a glorified heap of scrap metal, without even overloading him. Easy!

Then we all think, hey, sure, it’s just Levi, but this is a PUG! PUGs just do not work on our server. And we actually downed a boss! Let’s do another! How about XT?

We work out we have three tanks, one healer, and six DPS. Hmm, hardly optimal. Against my better judgement I tell them I can switch to offspec and heal. Bear in mind my only raid healing experience is less than an entire Wing in Naxx, so I’m not exactly confident in my abilities, especially not when there’s only two healers, I’m undergeared, and the other hasn’t done the boss.

Much to my (pleasant) surprise, aside from a couple of deaths to Bombs and Tantrums, we actually down XT! I was drier than the Sahara by the end of it (even with potting and using Mana Tide twice in the fight), but we did it!

He kindly drops me a little surprise – a snazzy helmet. Not a fantastic piece for Resto, due to lack of MP5, but certainly a nice ugprade over my goggles. Which is a shame really – them gogs are stylish.

By this point, we’re pretty chuffed with ourselves. We’ve got about 40 minutes till the server goes down to apply the patch. Let’s give Razorscale a shot!

It takes us four groundings to make her land permanently. There’s about a minute left on the enrage timer at this point. We’re never going to make it, no way. I dunno what she was at, but it was a fair chunk of health, when she enrages. But we press on. Spam heals. One tank goes down. Keep up the spam. Another tank goes down. She’s not got much health left. A third tank is still up. Spamspam OMGHE’SOUTOFRANGEWHATISHEDOING?!? spamspam VICTORY.

Squee! We made an attempt to get to Kologarn in the 20 minutes before servers went down, but we wiped on trash – can’t blame us, really, two stressful fights, and it being nearly 2AM.

Yeah, there’s a new patch out tomorrow. Normal mode 10 Man Ulduar is hardly impressive anymore, is it? Yes, actually, it is. I haven’t healed a raid in over a month. I’m undergeared. The other healer hadn’t done Ulduar before. We were the only two healers! My guild wiped endlessly on some bosses with three healers, much better than me! I’m so proud of myself, and of our rag tag little PUG, for achieving so much tonight.

It was an absolute blast, and it really made me miss getting to raid with my guild. There’s no real chance of me actually getting back into raiding, not with just over a month to go till Uni, and getting plenty of overtime at work. Sucks, kinda, but that’s life, eh?

Anyway, patch hits EU tomorrow, I’ve got the day off work (I was actually off today, too! I haven’t had two days off in a row for a few weeks now!), and I intend on making a start on my freshly re-furred Feral druid, currently sitting at level 53. Heirloom chest and epic ground mount should speed leveling right up, eh?

This blog ain’t dead yet, my friends!

(Apologies for slightly incoherent nature of this post. It’s now 2:15 AM. I’m ever so slightly tired.)

I raided tonight!

Shocking, Iknorite?

As you may have noticed, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. Still sort of am – no other raids this week that I can make, but I did join an Ulduar raid tonight.

Bosses were relatively uneventful – took Razorscale down, wiped over and over on Ignis, gave up and exploded Kologarn, got some healing boots. Good stuff. Not particularly exciting, but not bad.

What was fun was the banter. The guild mage, Yimi, (also known as HMS Battleship Yimi –cower-) always has something interesting/disturbing to say, be it over vent or in chat, such as:

Randomly shouted over vent: “Stop humping my frog!”

Philosophical: “It’s not fair – I just can’t multitask, even though I have these boobs”!”

In addition, she helped spawn a new guild meme.

Explaining Kologarn to someone who’d never seen him before:

“He’ll stare at you very intently, and you have to run away.”

“Stare at you WITH LASERS.”

Lasers are now the guild answer to everything. “How did you die?” “Lasers.” “Wow, your DPS is so high!” “I have laser gloves.” Apparently, she likes how I say the word “laser”, too.

Yes, yes, silly guild is silly, but it was nice to raid with ‘em again.

(We were killed – with lasers.)

The original Laser Heal – none of yer wannabe Energy Ball Heals.

At the limits of my patience with Keristrasza and her stupid mace, I decided I wanted to try and heal Naxxramas, with or without it.

As luck would have it, Kiaara was putting together a group for Naxx10, so I joined up with them to put my lazurz to the test. Patchwerk was already down, so we started with Grobbulus. It was kind of a sloppy kill, but we downed his fat ass, and as a reward for not destroying WoW due to Keri’s stinginess, he dropped a shiny Infection Repulser. Hurrah! –strokes his lovely mace-

Due to raid makeup, we decided not to try Gluth, and instead doubled back to Spider. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you will know that PUG + Me + Anub’Rekhan = fail. We failed twice, then we had success! For the “easiest” boss in the place, he’s always given me the most trouble!

Faerlina was totally uneventful. We wiped once on Maexxna – at 2% no less! We had four druids, and I swear not a one was using Abolish Poison! (Kia, you are allowed to not due to being Feral, but what was the tree’s excuse?!) I wasn’t in the main tanks group, so my Cleansing Totem wouldn’t affect him. We squished her the second time, though.

Moved onto Noth, and despite copious amounts of decursers, you betcha, I was the only person decursing. I was technically the raider healer, so I had the most time to do it, but still. Mneh.

Heigan was hilarious fail. Everyone but me (who was cheating and had my Enhancement boots with a run speed enchant equipped) and the tank died on the first dance phase. I was so tempted just to keep on going till Heigan was dead, but figured that might take quite some time, and the tank wanted to die, so we wiped and called it.

For my first raid healing experience, I’d say it was fairly successful. When I finally looked at the meters at the end of the raid (I’m a strong believer in basing your healers performance on “Did anyone die that you could have saved?” rather than LULZGAIZIDIDTHEMOSTHEALZ!) I had done the most overall healing, with (surprisingly) the least overheal (still like 28% or something).

On the other hand, healing assignments were kind of… loose. Whilst we had said that the Priest was on Main Tank, Druid on Off Tank, and me on raid, the other two were doing a lot of raid healing (probably why they were ending up sucked dry of mana when I still had 60%), and for my part I was doing a lot of panic heals on the tanks.

Contrary to somewhat popular belief re: shaman healing, no, chain heal was not all I used. There were some chain heal-tastic times, such as when a whole group of people were impaled on Anub’Rekhan, but most of my healing was actually in the form of Healing Wave (kinda surprised at that myself), though Chain Heal was very close behind.

Things I think I need to improve upon:

1. Clever use of Riptide. Riptide is a decent instant heal with a snazzy HoT component, and it will boost the next chain heal on that target by 25% (if they are the first target), consuming the HoT. I rarely used Riptide for this – it was used mostly for the HoT component (particularly on Maexxna, where every little HoT helps!) or as a quick heal if I had to keep moving (on myself at Heigan )
2. More use of Lesser Healing Wave. I love the Riptide animation and sound so much that I used it as my quick patch-up spell in Heroics. Raids do not really allow for it to be used like this, so I tried to use LHW more, but wasn’t really successful.
3. Sticking to my assigned role. The other two healers weren’t great about this either, but I found myself throwing panic heals at the tank far too often, possibly sniping other heals (though I would interrupt casting if I saw another heal going through)

Overall, it was pretty fun for my first attempt at healing in a Raid. I’d much rather be up there doing the pewpew, but still, I won’t be too miffed to switch over to healing on the rare occasions that I need to.

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S’been a while since my last update, so here’s some random stuff.

Little montage of my recent achievements (pre that Naxx run). Basically all self explanatory, except Orbital Bombardment. We left the Flame Tower up, which was kinda fun in an “omg I can’t move I’m surrounded by walls of fire eeek” way. It may have been a better idea to do something else – perhaps Storm tower? –shrugs- In any case, I got to be a chopper driver!

Hells yeah. Unfortunately, I was somewhat limited by game mechanics, but in my head, Ella was firing off lightning bolts and bursts of lava as she weaved in between dwarves and the legs of iron giants. She also tried to hook an iron dwarf on her claw as she drove by, but being made of metal, all that achieved was a nasty bend on her claw.

Soooo, Ulduar tonight! Having cleared the Siege of Ulduar last night, we moved onto the Antechamber.

First up was Kologarn. We wiped the first time – Kiaara must have eaten some eyebeams, our main tank followed soon after, and it snowballed from there. Our second attempt was much better. We kept the two tanks on Kologarn at all times, and our Kitty went Bear to pick up the adds that spawned when we killed his right arm. We lost someone towards the end, but by that point, Heroism had been popped and we were just racing to get that last few percent.

We then doubled back to try the Iron Council, though we debated trying Auriaya first. That might have been the best idea, in hindsight.

I dunno if we just had rotten luck, or if this is common, but the vast majority of our wipes on the council were due to Steelbreaker being midway through a Fusion Punch cast when BAM! a rune appears under him, splattering our tank all over the wall. That is really, really not cool. It’s not even like we can avoid it!

The one time we had any success, we actually made it to Stormcaller, but wiped due to eating an Overload, followed quickly by him floating into the air and disintegrating us all with lightning. Ow.

Still, pretty good progress. Not sure if we’ll see much of Ulduar for the next couple of weeks – our Guild Leader, and top healer, is getting married soon, so he’s not going to be on very often – not that we can hold that against him

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In other news – Drop it! Drop it! Or I swear by the dragonqueen I’ll never stop killing you!

Stupid Keristrasza and her stupid mace…

More Ulduar shenanigans tonight!

Started with XT-002 who had given us bother the last two raid nights. We one-shot him. Still let quite a few scrapbots through, and we had about 20 seconds left on his Enrage Timer, but we did it!

Since we’d taken him down with almost no bother, we doubled back to try Ignis, and his Vibrating Willy Warmer. The fight was pretty hectic – we had too many constructs up most of the time, one of our healers was splattered at one point, and much hot crotch pocketing was had. The fight seemed to drag on for ages, and I thought it would all fall apart in the end – but nope! Another one-shot!

So, that’s Soul Haven (plus Kiaara! ) officially cleared the Siege of Ulduar! Woot!

We then went ahead to try Kologarn, coming very close to a wipe on the Pokeball Rune mobs, then again when we managed to aggro the 3-mob trash pull and one of the big stone guys. Tank got two trash purples to drop here, too! Lucky bugger. We didn’t have time for Kologarn, but we’re going to continue on tomorrow night – hopefully take the Iron Council down, too.

I wanted to hear him shout “OBLIVION!” though, so…

Hehehe. Oops. –halo-

Progress – it tastes sweet.

Guild run of Ulduar tonight, and I actually got past Flame Leviathan! Ok, sure, we only downed one more boss, but still rather pleased.

We took down Razorscale – our first try we were kind of slow to ground her, and when we did, we had a couple of mishaps that resulted in DPS dying and her reaching the enrage timer. Second attempt was much better, and we took her down without any of us dying.

Lady Loot was on my side, and blessed me with two items. The first, a pair of awesome bracers to replace the crafted blues I had, and some legs for my offspec. Both items kinda fell to me by default, since the Hunter had the Bracers, and no one else could use the legs. Muwahaha.

I was really pleased with my DPS performance, too. Given I’m still in a lot of Heroic Blues (still iLevel 200 though – same as Naxx10), I think I’m doing pretty well. 2.7k on a boss where I had to be on the move for the first half, to take care of Watchers is not to be sneezed at, right?

We tried XT again, and did a lot better than we had on Monday night, where we didn’t get him much past 65% – and he just healed up after that anyway! We managed to get him to about 37% tonight, but due to one of our healers having problems, and letting too many scrapbots slip through, we weren’t able to kill him.

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In random alt news, I dusted off my Feral Druid last night. Whilst in Tanaris, I got an invite to an at-level Zul’Farrak party. I was sort of the tank – but an overzealous Ret Paladin did most of it. –coughs- We ripped through the place, and though I didn’t get the Embrace of the Lycan, but I did get a pretty good staff. Oh, and an entire levels worth of EXP just from the mobs, then another third from the quests, taking me from 45 to 47.

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In random silly news, Bytor sent me the code for some pet biscuits, so I was running around with a super Speedy tonight. Thanks!

Usually, I have a little PvP stint at 29 to get some gear and take a break from the levelling grind.

If, like me, you are a “new” paladin, used to being able to exorcise things… don’t PvP at a low level. You get to Judge and Auto-Attack, and press your Exorcism button and cry bitter tears when you realise it does nothing. It’s boring, and twink Hunters are even bigger nuisances than ever.

So, I skipped it on Flailsey, and charged on to level 30, and my 1g Riding Skill/Mount.

I think I’ll call him Geoffrey!

Sigh. Warlocks and Paladins are kinda hax. Druids are worse – you guys save around 880g! WUT. How is this fair?! –mutter mutter-

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We gave XT-002 a try last night – others in the guild had cleared FL and Razorscale last wednesday. We never got him down past 75%. First two times, turns out there was trash that hadn’t been pulled (hey, don’t look at me, I assumed they’d done that last raid!) which then came along with the scrap mobs during the heart phases, which were just generally a PITA aside from that.

Well, technically, we did get him to maybe 65%, but then he ate scrapbots. Shhh. We can’t help it that we suck.

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Softi, that nefarious ne’er do well, has tagged me for a meme! I’ve not actually had one for a while, so here goes.

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Mine was nowhere near as good (or horrifying! ) as hers, but here we go.

I couldn’t resist adding the “sticker” with a quote from a review by the Sun, since the name of the album made it sound like a stereotypical Emo piece, and the Sun has been known to give good reviews to crap. –coughs- Seems my opinions are showing…

Amusingly the picture looks kinda libraryish, but it’s from somewhere in the Netherlands.

I’ma refrain from tagging anyone specifically, but if you want to do a meme that lets you make a silly picture, then feel free to say I tagged you!

Friday and Monday, I’m signed up for raids. So are lots of other people. Not enough people turn up to raid, so, we can’t raid.

Wednesday I’m at Cinema with friends. Is good times.

Whilst I’m at cinema, the one raid night I’ve not been able to make for the past couple weeks, the guild actually does more than Flame Leviathan in Ulduar.

That… that’s just not fair.

I mean, it’s perfectly fair in the sense that the guild has to progress, and we have more members than can be there every raid. But goddamnit, it just had to be the one night I couldn’t raid. The one night, I, one of the few people that bothers to turn up for every raid I sign up for, can’t make it. I knew they were probably going to do Ulduar, and real life -> WoW (hence going to Cinema), but… damnit! The one night I couldn’t raid! Arglebargle!

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Also, Malygos tonight. Half my guild, half another guild. The other guild wasn’t quite able to grasp “If Malygos fires big laser of nastiness at you, please to be using shield, kthx.” – on our final attempt, we actually had three and a half minutes left when we got to phase 3, which would have been more than enough to kill him, if people weren’t dropping out of the sky like flies.

Then again, we should have had even more time than that, but, y’know, let’s bring three hunters to a ten man, instead of taking a DK to help with Spark control. It’s cool though, I let the ranged take all the sparks since I was the only melee, and I usually still out DPS’d two of the Hunters.

Argh. I have rotten luck.

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Other news, in bitesize.

I’m going to aim for this achievement on Ellaria, to tide me over with a decent title until Midsummer. Wish I had decided this a few days ago, as I had been skipping valiant Sword daily, significantly extending time I now have to do Argent Tournament for.

Level 20 on Flailsey. I am now officially The Undead Crushinator. Make sure I have Seal of Command active. Pull Undead mob with Exorcism – guaranteed crit. Hammer of Justice the mob. Judge the seal, guaranteed crit. Gather loot from the fine powder that remains. Laugh heartily (Paladins can’t cackle – that’s too evil.)

Westfall and the Defias really suck. It may surprise you to learn that this was my first character through Westfall. It’s also my last. Hatehatehate.

Brigwyn is on TNB tonight. Oh, such heckling he shall recieve!

As you can see, I’ve not done anything really interesting recently.

I wish I could see more Ulduar, and get to go a bit more in depth about Enhancement DPS. Malygos is a terrible gague, due to sparks and vehicles.