Last week’s Friday Fun Night was held in Dragon Soul, which most of the raid hadn’t seen since the end of Cataclysm.  Our purpose there was to finish up the Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider achievement to get our Twilight Harbringer drakes, maybe for transmog gear, but definitely for fun.  I invited Chewy’s rogue, Stunnah, to come along to finish up his Fangs of the Father daggers that we never got to complete back in Cata.  Along with Stunnah, we had Slice, Lyss, Zari, Bocat, Van, Vaunt (Tyledres‘ fresh level 90 warlock that she leveled up in our guild) and our fellow Frostee friends, Navi and Lushnek.  Almost a blogger’s paradise, looks like Stunnah and Lushnek need a blog, ya?

We started the night with a quick clear of Heroic Throne of the Four Winds to complete the last achievement for Navi’s and Lush’s Glory of the Cataclysm Raider meta, then it was a quick port to the Caverns of Time to begin our Dragon Soul run.  Navi and Lush already completed the Dragon Soul meta with their guild back in Cataclysm, but they still came along and offered to help us with DS.

Morchok was first and we left him on normal so that the Don’t Stand So Close to Me achievement would be easier to get for those that needed it, but we burned him down so fast that we didn’t even get a black blood phase.  Maybe we could have done him on Heroic, but I wasn’t sure if bringing out Kohcrom would complicate things, since we were only going with one tank for the night.

We then went to Warlord Zon’ozz and did him on normal to get a clean Ping Pong Champion.  We only needed 10 bounces, but because of a few dps that didn’t move behind Zon’ozz, I think we ended up bouncing the Void of Unmaking at least 12 or 13 times, lol.

Next was Yor’sahj the Unsleeping, who we did flip to Heroic to give those who needed Taste the Rainbow! a better chance at more color combinations having four oozes up.  I already had the achievement, just needed the Heroic kill.

As we made our way to Hagara the Stormbinder, Navi whispered me about the Holding Hands achievement, which we didn’t have, and said that it was her favorite one to do.  She even said that we didn’t have to kill the boss to get it, so I figured we’d go for it and then wipe afterwards to kill her on Heroic.  Navi and Lush positioned us for the achievement and we made a cool looking lightning chain in the shape of a U, which I forgot to take a screenshot of. ><

Ultraxion, the bane of the extra button pushing (or Ultra-Zion, as someone in the guild called him in the past, like he was from the Matrix movie lol), was next.  I might be mistaken, but I think we tried to do this on Heroic back when DS was current as this was supposed to be the second easiest Heroic fight after Heroic Morchok.  We came close before, but just couldn’t get him down.  This time though, it was much easier…even though some people still died to Hour of Twilight or Fading Light, lol.  We only had 2 or 3 Hour of Twilights to worry about, so Minutes to Midnight was also easy to get.

The corrupt Tauren, Warmaster Blackhorn, was next up.  We tried to get Deck Defender for some, but we let a Twilight Barrage explode on the ship, so we just downed him on Heroic instead.  It was cool to see Blackthorn’s mount, Goriona, land on the ship too, a neat addition to the fight on Heroic.

We were gonna do Spine and Madness of Deathwing on Heroic, but Lushnek mentioned that in order to do it, we would have to have done all the bosses on Heroic, which we did not do for Morchok and Zon’ozz.  So instead, we did them both on normal and started Madness on Alexstrasza’s platform to knockout the second part of Chromatic Champion.

All in all, it was another fun night raiding old content.  We’ll definitely be back here for at least another two weeks, maybe more (Stunnah needs 45 more Elemental Gem Clusters and a Deathwing Kill to finish up the legendaries).  I think most of us need Zon’ozz on Heroic and the final two platforms, Nozdormu and Kalecgos, for Chromatic Champion left to get our mounts.  And even though Spine and Madness of Deathwing on Heroic are not needed for the meta, I’m pretty sure everyone wants that sweet title, Savior of Azeroth, off Madness.  Thanks again to Navi and Lush for coming along and helping us with our kills and achievements and I’ll see everyone this Friday for more Dragon Soul raiding. =)

“If at first, you don’t succeed on your first 70 attempts, then just brute force the #$%^&**#%@!”
- Shadow Rising Raiding

Yeah, that is definitely our motto.  After weeks and nights of trying different strats on the Council of Elders, we employed the good ‘ole brute force strat and finally downed them last night!  Good job guys!

The night started off not so promising, as we were missing some of our core raiders.  Wok, my co-tank, was out for the night and Adoe was having laptop issues, so Shadeey let him use her desktop, which meant we were down a dps.  We enlisted the help of a couple of our reserves, Bocat and Sorak’s rogue friend, Psynite, who just hit 90 not even a week ago.

We’ve been rotating through different strats, like burning the empowered Troll on every switch, zerging Sul the Sandcrawler off the bat, leaving him as the second empowered Troll, tank swapping the Frigid Assault stacks, etc.  But the one that worked for us in the end was one that SR has been doing all along: pure brute force.

We went with one tank, me, and three heals.  The plan was to kill Sul as fast as possible without allowing him to get empowered at all and having his Sandling adds run all over us.  I tanked Sul, High Priestess Mar’li and Frost King Malakk close together so that we could spread the raid cleave damage among them and left Kazra’jin, aka Blanka,alone to do his Rolling Attack all over the place.  All dps focused on Sul and interrupted his Sand Bolts as much as possible, while doing just enough damage on the current empowered Troll to force an empowerment switch.  This meant that we would ignore the Blessed Loa Spirits from Mar’li and let the heals go through while I became a meat-shield for the raid and ate all Frigid Assault stacks and allowed myself to get frozen.  We rotated big cooldowns on me, like Pain Suppression, Guardian of Ancient Kings and Ardent Defender, to mitigate damage while I was frozen, with the healers doing their best to keep me up.  Killing the Shadowed Loa Spirits was still a priority, as there is no way to avoid their insta-leap kill.

As soon as Sul went down, it was just a matter of keeping our composure and dpsing down each empowered Troll until they fell one by one.  And then victory was finally ours!

Afterwards, we put a couple attempts on Tortos to see the fight and the damage is pretty crazy on that….brute force, anyone? =)  Grats to everyone again on the kill, hopefully we can get Tortos down next week!

Oh and one other thing of note, Bocat has been in every one of our first boss kills in Throne of Thunder so far…and she’s managed to stay alive every time at the end, lol.  Looks like Bo may be SR’s good luck raiding charm!

After a couple of weeks of anticipation, a broken F5 button and lots of luck, I managed to snag tickets for Chewy and myself to this November’s Blizzcon!  We tried to make it out to California earlier than that, but we couldn’t get tickets to the San Diego Comic-Con this year.  I think Blizzcon will be a good replacement for our Cali convention fix, lol.

Last Wednesday was the first night that the tickets went on sale, which is also one of SR’s raid nights.  We were working on the Council of Elders and I told the guys ahead of time that I would be taking a break for a couple of minutes during the raid to try to get the tickets.  We wiped a few minutes before 10:30 pm on one of our attempts, so I took this moment and went afk from the game to get ready to buy tickets.  I began spamming the F5 buttons on both my desktop and laptop to refresh the ticket purchase page and when I got through, I ended up 9000-ish and 12000-ish in queue.  I called Chewy to ask was place he was in and he said he was in the lower 8000s.  We then started calculating what place we needed to be in to get into the store, based on the percentage of tickets left and how far we moved up in the queue.  We deducted that we needed to be in the 4000-5000 range for a shot at the tickets, which was confirmed as the store closed with Chewy left at around 3000 and me 4000 in line.  I felt pretty bummed not getting the tickets, but that didn’t last long as we managed to kill the Council of Elders for the first time that night.  I guess you could say I took out my disappointment on the Council by solo-tanking them all, lol.

So yesterday was our last shot at getting tickets, this time the tickets going on sale at 1pm.  I called Chewy minutes before to make sure he was ready but I couldn’t get a hold of him.  I was worried that he’d forgotten and thought our chances of getting into the store had gotten slimmer.  Not wanting that to discourage me, I focused on that F5 button and smashed it as fast as I could and when I finally got through, I was surprised that I ended up 2600 in queue!  I pushed the keyboard and mouse away from me for fear that I would accidentally close out the window when Chewy finally called me.  He had phone issues, but was online to purchase tickets, although he was 6000 in queue.  I told him what place in line I was and he then excitedly started talking about what we would be doing in Cali and I stopped him quick because I didn’t want me to jinx me, lol.  Twenty minutes later, I was the proud owner of tickets to Blizzcon 2013! Woot!

This is my first Blizzcon I’ll be attending, so I’m pretty excited.  I think it’ll be awesome to be there live for the new announcements, like maybe the next WoW expansion, Diablo expansion or even the new Titan project.  And lots of swag to buy too, Chewy’s already said he’s gonna be spending a lot on that, lol.  I’m also looking forward to meeting some of the Blizzard crew, WoW Insider staff and my fellow bloggers who will be in attendance. =)

Hmmm, all this Blizzcon ticket talk….maybe I should start making my plane and lodging arrangements now, huh?

This past Friday night, the guild went back into Dragon Soul to work on more achievements towards the Glory of the Dragon Soul meta.  We had most of the FFN peeps on: myself, Lyss, Slice, Van, Stunnah, Bocat, Shirl and Vaunt.  Yep, that’s two pallies, two priests and 3 warlocks…I’m glad this isn’t our regular raid comp, can you imagine the competition for tier tokens? ><  No Navi and Lush time around, so I invited Luxy to come along and Lyss brought a warrior friend, Critixix, who turned out to be an alt of Njeri, our long time guild hunter back in Wrath when we raided ICC.

We decided to leave the entire raid on Heroic, so we could do both Heroic Spine and Madness of Deathwing.  Solo-tanking Morchok and his twin was easy and so was Yor’shaj; we even left up two sets of blobs and those who needed the remaining combinations for Taste the Rainbow got that completed.

I guess we really like playing Ping-Pong on Zon’ozz’s fight, we just kept bouncing that Void Orb back and forth so much that a second one spawned right before we killed him.

Hagara, Ultraxion and Blackthorn went smoothly and then it was time for Deathwing.  We had a couple hiccups on Spine; on one attempt, we got to the final tendon, but we had too many people on one side and Deathwing rolled over and threw everyone off.  Another attempt, Van let Blood Corruption: Death run its full duration on someone to see if it would really wipe the raid…which it did. ><  The next attempt went much smoother and we finally got Heroic Spine down.

For Madness of Deathwing, we started out on Nozdormu’s platform to knock out another part of Chromatic Champion.  Everything was going great until we hit phase 2, when the Congealing Bloods came out.  We didn’t realize that they would heal Deathwing up 1% for each blood that reached him.  We tried to brute force it by burning Deathwing down while ignoring the Bloods, but we couldn’t catch up on dps and I eventually got smashed tanking the two Elementium Terrors and eating too many tetanus stacks.  The second attempt, we focused on the Bloods first, killing as many as we could and then the Terrors and used Lust after we cleared the platform.  Soon after, Deathwing fell and Heroic Madness was complete.

For killing Madness of Deathwing on Heroic, you’re rewarded with a pretty nifty title, Savior of Azeroth.

So all that’s left for the meta is doing Madness with Kalecgos’ platform left to start on and then we should have our mounts.  Looking forward to this Friday to finish this up!

No, we didn’t get Tortos down this week, but we did progress and got him down to 29% on our best attempt Wednesday night.  Hopefully he’ll go down next week.

So what’s this post about?  Well, I just couldn’t let Van have all the mount BMAH glory to herself this week… =P

It’s been a long time since I’ve won anything off the BMAH, mainly because there hasn’t been anything on there worth buying or there were auctions that I lost at the last minute.  I missed out on two X-51 Nether-Rockets, one to Sorak and another because I was so focused on leveling up my mage that I forgot to check up on the auction before it ended, lol.  I did buy a special “weapon” that I’ve been meaning to post, but the screenshots for it have been buried in my folder, so I’ll have to fish for them and post about it later.

What I did win was this guy Tuesday night, a Riding Turtle!

The Riding Turtle is the first mount ever offered by the WoW TCG.  It comes from the rare loot card, Saltwater Snapjaw, from the first set of the TCG, Heroes of Azeroth.  It is one of three loot cards from the set, with the Hippogryph Hatchling pet and the Tabard of the Flame being the other two.

This mount was one I coveted the most when I first started playing WoW, only because it was the only turtle mount available in the game at the time.  The turtle mount didn’t increase your speed on land (it was the same as walking on foot), but got a speed boost when used in the water.  And the space bar or /mountspecial emote is hilarious with its hide-in-the-shell animation and special sound effects.

I tried to get the loot card as I started building my WoW TCG collection and even bought several cheap booster boxes for a chance at one, just never got lucky.  I did end up getting the Hippogryph pet and the Tabard of the Flame, which just sits in my bank, waiting for Blizz to implement a Tabard Storage or Tabard Tab (please?).

In Wrath, I got another chance at a turtle mount when the Sea Turtle, a blue version of the Riding Turtle, was introduced.  I managed to snag mine from a pool when doing some of the Ka’luk fishing dailies in Northrend.  I’ve had good times with my Sea Turtle, especially charging at super slow speed into boss fights like Baleroc and Morchok, lol.

More sea mounts made their way into the game, like the seahorse mounts and the Reins of Poseidus from Vashj’ir in Cataclysm and finally in Mists, pandas got their own sea turtles with their racial mounts, the Dragon Turtles.  Water Striders gave us a new dimension to sea mounts by allowing us to ride them across the water, previously only done by Warlocks and their Felsteeds with help from a glyph, Death Knights with Path of Frost on or anyone under the Water Walking effect given by Shamans.

If only Blizz gave us the ability to fish off these mounts without being dismounted….that would totally make these mounts even more awesome. =)

“Slow and steady wins the race.”  This quote couldn’t have been more appropriate for a fight like Tortos the turtle.  We might have been slow and taken a lot of attempts, but we persisted and finally killed the big guy last night to put us at 4/12 in the Throne of Thunder.  Grats SR!

Tuesday night started out real good, we one-shotted everything up to Tortos with ease, giving us all night to work on the big turtle.  We were short a healer and a tank, so we brought in Chewy on his Drak shammy, Smutt, to fill in for Zarm and Zug went tank for Wok.  We tried to replicate our progress from last week, but we just couldn’t get it together.  Poor Smutt, this was his first time seeing the fight and he kept dying to the Rockfalls in the first three or four pulls.  He wasn’t the only one either, I know I was bad at it and so were others and we also had trouble kicking shells at Tortos in time.  I think we ended the night not even getting Tortos below 50% on any attempt.

We regrouped and went at it again last night with a different setup.  We had Zarm and Wok back, but Lyss couldn’t stay all night to raid and opted to sit out, which left us with Adoe and Shadeey at ranged on shell duty and 5 melee (me, Wok, Sorak, Zug and Psynite) up front with Tortos.  Zug helped the ranged out with dpsing down the Whirling Turtles and would Heroic Leap back into melee range.  We did a lot better avoiding the Rockfalls and rotated through raid CDs during each of  Tortos’ Stomps.

It took us five or six attempts last night, but on the last attempt, everything came together and we finally took down the turtle.

With Tortos defeated, we moved onto Megaera, the hydra boss.  We had some really good attempts our first time on this encounter and even managed to kill five heads on a few of those attempts.  I think once we get our CDs figured out, we’ll be able to kill the final two heads and maybe get a new boss kill next week. =)

Lyss, Arv and Van on Twilight Harbinger Drakes

After having a week off from doing our Friday Fun Nights, we finally finished the Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider meta and got our drakes last Friday.  Grats to everyone that got them!  The mount looks awesome and the model looks like Alexstraza’s dragon form.

All that was left was to complete Madness of Deathwing, starting on Kalecgos’ platform.  We had most of our FFN regulars (me, Lyss, Slice, Stunnah, Van, Bocat, Vaunt and Luxy) and brought in Zug’s sis, Galanna too.  It was a quick run and it only took us an hour to do.

Vaunt and Bocat still need a Madness kill on Ysera’s platform for their drakes and Stunnah is halfway done with the daggers, so we’ll probably be doing DS for a few more weeks.  Thanks to everyone for coming to these DS runs and helping out get these awesome mounts!

An interesting thing happened over the weekend.  We actually did some pvp with the guild, lol.  Saturday night, Psynite and Slice were chatting it up in guild chat and someone mentioned about running some BGs as a group.  I was messing around on an alt trying to get a second farm going, but I quickly abandoned that and switched over to Arv to tag along for some BGs.  Adoe and Lyss also joined and so we had a nice 5-man group ready to pvp.

Our first BG was Silvershard Mines.  I noticed that the northern cart was close to the depot, so I made a run for it as soon as the gates dropped.  I was accompanied by a few Hordies and there was only one Alliance there to challenge us, so we quickly took control of the cart right as it entered the shaft for a nice achievement.

We ended up winning that BG pretty decisively.  I’m not sure what it is about Silvershard, but I’ve won it in every group I’ve been with.  Crazy luck maybe?

We had a couple of games in The Battle of Gilneas, which went really well and also turned out to be both Horde victories.  I decided to go Prot with my pvp gear on to protect and AoE around the flags, which turned out really well.  The Alliance could not assault a flag that I guarded. =)

Next up was Warsong Gulch.  For capture the flag BGs like this and Twin Peaks, I usually go Prot and volunteer to be the flag carrier.  Right off the bat, I raced over the Alliance base and quickly ran back, ready to capture it.  It didn’t take long, as our Horde flag carrier kill group quickly downed the Alliance flag carrier for a quick capture.  As Slice mentioned that night, the Alliance quickly gave up and didn’t bother trying to cap our flag from that point on.   They pretty much hovered in the middle, trying to get Honor kills instead.  That seems to be the norm, though.  I ‘ve been in many Horde groups where we would also lose the first flag and everyone would just give up.  I’ll at least make a game out of it; I’ll keep running after the flag even if we’re down 2-0.

It didn’t take too long to cap the other two flags, the Alliance tried to slow me down on the third, but I popped my trinket and sped up the ramp for another quick capture and another achievement for finishing in under 7 minutes.

The next BG was another Silvershard Mines match.  Like the previous SM game, the Horde dominated and we were capturing carts left and right.  We had such a big lead that I even had time to run around to find the Restoration and Berserking buffs for an achievement.

And I even escorted a cart from the spawn point all the way to the depot.

Those final achievements finally pushed me in the 17,000 club too.

Our last BG of the night was Arathi Basin, which we didn’t win.  We couldn’t overcome the Alliance resources and they pretty much controlled 3 out of the 5 territories the entire match.  Still, winning 5 of 6 BGs was a pretty successful night for us.

Adoe, Lyss and Slice decided to call it a night after the AB game, so Psynite asked me if I wanted to do some 2v2 arenas with him.  The last time I did any arenas was with Slice and Adoe towards the end of Cata.  I’ve been wanting to get back into them, as this is the easiest way to cap your Conquest points for the week.  So I dropped the team I was on with Adoe and joined Psy’s Morphlings.

Before Psy joined SR, he was an avid pvper back on his other server.  He mainly ran as either a paladin or a hunter and I think he mentioned he did 2s, 3s, 5s and even rated BGs, so he has a lot of experience.  Sorak invited his Rogue over to Drak to help fill our raid dps when we were short peeps and has done an awesome job getting raid ready with all the gear he’s been getting.  He’s been pvping on his Rogue a lot lately, and even though it was new to him, he still tears up the charts, lol.

While waiting for our first arena match, I bought the last two Malevolent pieces I needed to complete my set, the bracers and cloak, with the Honor points I accumulated that night.  I didn’t get to gem or enchant several of my pieces before the matches started to roll in.

Our first handful of matches were…..bleh.  I was rusty and it showed.  I was popping my trinkets at the wrong times, blowing my CDs on the wrong target and was just getting owned.  I was worried that Psy was thinking he made a mistake pairing up with me, lol.  But we kept at it and eventually started to get some wins in.  I took a break about halfway through our matches to gem/enchant/reforge my gear and it definitely made a difference.  Psy noticed it too, as my burst was quicker and damage higher, which increased my confidence.

As double dps, we had to rely on a lot of burst and damage on one player, throwing in CCs when we could.  We tried different strats on the start, from going in stealth with Psy cloaking the both of us to me running in like a madman to bait the other team from coming out of stealth.  Once a meat shield, always a meat shield, right? Lol

We found success against teams with double dps too, Death Knights seemed the squishiest, so we always targeted them first.  We did go up against add odd pairing, a Hunter and a blood DK, who was sitting at 480K health.  We tried to focus down the DK, but he was doing some crazy self-healing and the Hunter eventually picked us off one by one.  We met the same group a few matches later, this time we burned the Hunter down and slowly killed the DK.  I’d like to try going prot once, but I doubt I’d last as long as a blood DK.

Teams with healers gave us the most difficulty, especially ones with Holy Paladins and Resto Druids.  I hate Holy Pallys in BGs because they’re so hard to kill and they are just the same in arenas.  We did find success against Disc Priests and Mistweaver Monks.  In the monk fight, I got caught up in their disarming ability, which was pretty annoying, but I don’t think their team was well geared because they went down fast.

Psy and I played enough winning games to reach the 1800 Conquest point cap for the week, the other 400 points have to come from rated BGs, which I don’t see myself getting into unless I can find a group, lol.  Our win-loss record may be abysmal, but hey, it was our first night running together.  =P

I was able to snag the Tyrannical helm with my Conquest points to go along with the Tyrannical gloves I got off Nalak last week.  Psy said that the Tyrannical weapons are really good and he hopes to get one in a couple of weeks.  I’ll probably work towards that too, Starshatter is ok, but unless I get a two-handed drop from ToT, the Tyrannical one is my best bet.

Thanks guys for an awesome pvp night and thanks to Psy for getting me excited about doing arenas again!

Sorry this post is a little dated by a week or so, but I wanted to post some our screenshots and achievements with Challenge Modes lately.  I think the most interesting part about this latest string of runs is that each one involved a different lineup.

Here is a Gate of the Setting Sun run that we got bronze in.  This is the original Challenge Mode Noob (CMN) group of me, Navi, Lush, Luxy and Karn.

Luxy, Arv, Lush, Karn, Navi and friends in Gate of the Setting Sun

Another bronze medal was earned in the Siege of Niuzao Temple.  We didn’t have Karn this time, so I brought in Zug to join us.

Arv, Zug, Luxy, Lush and Navi in Siege of Niuzao Temple

The hardest Challenge Mode of the bunch, Shado-Pan Monastery proved to be just that.  Navi invited another fellow Frostee, Souglyy, to join us for the run.  We had a rough time with this CM and didn’t medal, but we pushed on and still finished it through.

Arv, Navi, Luxy, Lush and Souglyy in Shado-Pan Monastery

We wanted to do another, but Souglyy was feeling tired, so Luxy asked another friend, Ut, who came along and brought his pally, Makemebad.  This time we hit up Stormstout Brewery, which I missed on a previous run that the Frostees had with Zug and Adoe.  This time, we got a Bronze.

Makemebad (Ut), Arv, Luxy, Navi and Lush in Stormstout Brewery

Later that night, we had another go at a CM I missed, Scholomance.  This time, Navi asked their warrior, Fallnapart, to come along.  We came close to getting another Bronze, but just fell short.  I did get the Challenge Conqueror achievement for completing all the Challenge Modes.

Luxy and Arv in Scholomance

We tried our hand again in Scarlet Halls, a Challenge that we didn’t medal in.  Short again a dps, Navi asked one of their warlocks, Azadelta, to come.  Three brezzes!  This time we were successful in getting a Bronze medal.

Luxy, Arv, Lush, Aza and Navi in Scarlet Halls

Zug was feeling the CM bug one Monday night, so he got me, Adoe, Shadeey and Slice to group together for a Gate of the Setting Sun run, the first Shadow Rising CM run in a long time.  We ended up running it three times in a row, each time getting faster and faster.  On the last run, we were making good time for Silver and were surprised that we didn’t get it after killing Raigonn.  The reason:

Yep, two freakin’ mobs, lol.  We quickly ran out of the instance and ran back in and took care of a few adds that we skipped at the beginning to finally claim our prize.

Shadeey, Zug, Arv and Slice in Gate of the Setting Sun (Not Pictured: Adoe)

This past Monday, the original SR Challenge Mode team of me, Zug, Adoe, Sorak and Slice decided to go back to Gate and improve on our Silver and go for the Gold.  On our best attempt, we completed the run in 16 minutes, 4 minutes shy of the Gold.  We would have had more attempts at it, but with all the resetting we were doing, some of us got the “You’ve entered too many instances recently” message or were having login issues.  So we left it at that for the night.

Navi mentioned on her blog that I might be getting CM burnout from running on two teams, but honestly, I’m enjoying it.  Different compositions call for different strategies and you’ve really gotta think quick on your feet to adjust.  With the CMN team, we’ve got at least two brezzes from Navi and Lush, so you have a little leeway if someone goes down.  With the SR team, we have no brezzers, so you really have to pop CDs and blessings at the right time to keep everyone alive cause you can’t really afford to be a man down if you want to make good time.

But no matter what, I’m determined to help both teams reach their goals, whether to get all Silvers for the mount or even Golds for the transmog gear. =)

I pity the Fool’s Gold!

Sometime soon, the latest 5.3 patch will bring a change to all profession gathers of the rock and flower variety.

From MMO-Champion:

• Miners can now level mining from a low skill level completely in Pandaria. Nodes will yield Ghost Iron Nuggets with the amount being determined by your skill level. You can combine ten nuggets to make one ore.
• Herbalists can now level herbalism from a low skill level completely in Pandaria. Nodes will yield a partial herb with the amount being determined by your skill level. You can combine 10 of the partial herbs to form a complete herb.
• Currently on the PTR, you will sometimes get fragments and the actual herb or ore when gathering near the minimum level for that node type.

This is one change I’m looking forward to.  I have all the professions covered and maxed across my alts on Drak, so any new characters I make, I usually make them Miners/Herbalists.  This also goes for new toons I make on new servers.

My little gobby Warrior, Dizzee, is at level 85, waiting for her turn to experience Pandaria.  She is one of my dual gatherers, with her Herbalism skill at 40 and Mining at 46.  Because I’m spoiled with tank insta-queues, I leveled her as Prot mainly through LFD, so her professions suffered as a result.

The same goes for my pandaren Monk, Siopao.  She’s at 53 Herbalism and 42 Mining and is only level 50,  but with full Heirlooms, the Enlightenment buff and the insta-queues as a Brewmaster tank, she’ll be in Outland and Northrend before I know it, not being able to farm at the appropriate level without having to go back to Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms.

The only downside I see to this change is the supply of the lower level ore and herbs and the Auction House economy.  My toons off Drak that have Mining and Herbalism rely on selling these low-level materials on the AH to provide them cash flow for riding, flying, etc.  The lack of these mats will hurt those leveling Alchemy, Engineering, Blacksmithing, Inscription and Jewelcrafting, especially if they can’t farm for themselves.

We’ll see what happens when the patch comes out.  But for now, I’m excited to catch up on my gathering professions for my alts on Pandaria.

***SPOILER ALERT!!!  The following post contains events from Patch 5.3, so read at your own risk!***

“Da Darkspear never gonna give up.”

- Vol’jin

Patch 5.3 hit last week and the time to end Garrosh’s reign as the leader of the Horde and take back Orgrimmar has begun!  The first thing I did Tuesday was to start the new questline, which involved the new scenarios.  With these new scenarios came Heroic versions as well and weren’t too difficult to complete.  Completing your first Heroic scenario of the day can reward you with a ilevel 516 item, which is a nice upgrade from your standard ilevel 502 drops from LFR Throne of Thunder.

The first scenario you’re given by Lorewalker Cho is Blood in the Snow, which is a story told from the Alliance side, so Hordies get to be transformed into the Alliance, similar to the Culling of Stratholme instance.  This scenario was pretty quick, just be careful of the patrolling mobs, they could make your Heroic run messy.

The next scenario you’re given is the Dark Heart of Pandaria, which involves investigating the hole that the Horde dug up in the Vale of the Eternal Blossoms.  The only tricky parts I found here were pulling too many of the Elementals at the beginning and make sure to keep moving on the last boss.

I also noticed this giant Mogu NPC named Norushen at the end of the scenario.  I wonder what role he has in all of this..

Afterwards, Cho sends you to Sen’jin Village to meet with Vol’jin, Chen and Thrall.  Vol’jin plans on taking over Razor Hill, which will act as his staging grounds for the upcoming assault on Orgrimmar.

Once Razor Hill is under control, Cho will send you on a quest in Kun-Lai to help Seer Hao Pham Roo get to the top of Mount Neverest where he gives you information on the final Sha and rewards you with ilevel 502 boots.

Back in Razor Hill, you’re given a weekly quest to gather supplies from certain mobs in the Northern Barrens to assist in the siege of Orgrimmar efforts.  You need to collect 150 supplies of wood, meat, stone and oil and you’re rewarded with 200 Valor points and a Radical Mojo.  The Radical Mojo can be used to purchase a mini hydra pet, Gahz’rooki, a Brawler’s Guild quest or to convert any of the Kor’kron vestments you find in the Barrens to a ilevel 489 armor piece for your spec.  Kinda pointless for your main toon since they should have better, but would definitely help out any alts that might need it.

After completing the weekly quest, you’re rewarded with an achievement.  If you are Horde, you are also granted the title, “Darkspear Revolutionary”.

Sadly, it’s not a sharable title that you can have on your other Horde toons, so you’ll have to complete the questline again if you want it.  I think the title goes great with any Troll, but my hunter is only 86, so he’s got a long way to go, lol.

Completing the questline on the Alliance side grants you the “Hordebreaker” title, which sounds sooo much cooler.  I’ll have to get working on Val so that she can sport that title in true Alliance fashion.

I thought the story progression for 5.3 was done well, albeit short, but it definitely sets us up for what’s to come in the 5.4 raid.  Look out Garrosh, your time as ruler of the Horde is about to come to an end!

Keeping pet collectors/battlers busy, Patch 5.3 introduced 20 new pets into the mix.  These pets can be acquired from old/new raids, pet battles, zone drops or can be bought with in-game/RL currency.  Here are the available pets and some that I have acquired already.

Karazhan

One of my favorite old raids to run, I ran this the first week of patch 5.3 with six different toons and didn’t manage a single pet drop, lol.  I didn’t even get the Big Bad Wolf as the Opera event once.  But I had some generous friends that helped me with a couple of them.

Tyledres, the Lil’ Bad Wolf – from the Big Bad Wolf from the Opera Event.  A surprise gift from Tyledres, I received this pet on the first day of 5.3.  Thanks Ty!

Stormer, the Menagerie Custodian – from the Curator.  I’m a big fan of mechs and was really excited when they made the Sunreaver Micro-Sentry a pet, which Luxy had given to me as a gift back in 5.2.  This pet shares the same color, just a different color scheme.  I named this pet after a Lego Hero Factory toy that I have that looks pretty close to it.

Ermyc, the Netherspace Abyssal - from Prince Malchezaar.  Cymre has been trying to get me a pet that I didn’t have for a long time now, so she finally managed to do that, lol.  The best part of this pet other than the awesome model?  I don’t have to do the Chess Event anymore! Woohoo!  Thanks Cym!

Fiendish Imp - from Terestian Illhoof.  The last pet I need from Kara and I’ll be done with farming for pets in Kara.

Tempest Keep

I’m glad that a pet doesn’t drop from Kael’thas Sunstrider; I haven’t figured out how to solo him on my pally yet and I’m not sure if it’s possible with the stupid mind-controlling that goes on in that fight.  The rest of the bosses aren’t too bad, though.

Meggatron, the Pocket Reaver - from the Void Reaver.  I originally tried to name my Personal World Destroyer Megatron, but Blizz won’t accept that name for a pet, so I named it Galvatron, which is probably better cause he’s more purplish in color.  After acquiring the Pocket Reaver, I still wanted to give him the Decepticon’s leader’s name, so I settled for a different spelling instead.

Phoenix Hawk Hatchling – from Al’ar and Lesser Voidcaller - from High Astromancer Solarian.  Two more pets to go and farming for Tempest Keep pets will be complete.

Serpentshrine Cavern

I’ve only run this raid twice before patch 5.3, once to get the achievement for completing it and the other to fish up The Lurker Below for The Lurker Above achievement.  Now I have a reason to come back, lol.  Soloing Lady Vashj took me long to do, but it definitely can be done, just make sure to kill the Coilfang Elites before they can fear you and kill the Tainted Elementals quick to get their cores to push the Lady into Phase 3.

Andre Teh Giant, the Tideskipper - from Morogrim Tidewalker.  An homage to the late wrestler of WWF (it will always be this acronym to me, it’s what I grew up with and WWE has never sounded right) and the movie The Princess Bride fame.  His epic fights with Hulk Hogan were always the best.

Tainted Waveling - from Hydross the Unstable , Coilfang Stalker - from Lady Vashj.  Just need these two and the Serpentshrine Cavern will be done.

Collecting all the pets from Karazhan, Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Cavern earns you the achievement, Raiding with Leashes II: Attunement Edition and rewards you another pet, Tito.

Isle of Thunder/Giants

The Isles of Pandaria have two pet drops that can be farmed off certain mobs.  I was lucky enough to find them cheap on the auction house, which saved me from having to make trips out to the Isles.

Cera, the Direhorn Runt - can drop from the Direhorns on the Isle of Giants.  Cera from The Land Before Time movie was the only baby triceratops name I could think of.

Col Mustard, the Filthling -  can drop from the Quivering Filths on the Isle of Thunder.  I honestly don’t know why named the Filthling that, maybe it was the only yellow thing I could think of or I just had the game Clue on the mind, lol.

Throne of Thunder

To keep your Living Sandling, Ji-Kun Hatchling and Son of Animus company, there are more pets to collect from the current raid of MoP, Throne of Thunder.  I haven’t gotten my hands on any of these yet, nor seen them on the auction house, but Zari did get a Pygmy Direhorn on a LFR he recently did.  That would go perfect with the Horridon mount I got, so I could finally reunite the family together, lol.

Pygmy Direhorn – drops from Horridon LFR/Normal/Heroic

Living Fluid - drops from Primordius LFR

Viscous Horror - drops from Primordius Normal/Heroic

Other 5.3 Pets

Stunted Direhorn -  awarded from the Brutal Pet Brawler achievement, which involved winning 250 PvP pet battles through the Find Battle system using a full team of level 25 pets.  I’ve maybe done one battle and didn’t bother with it again.  Looks like this will be a project to work on for another time, lol.

Trizilla, the Gahz’rooki - sold by Ravika, the Darkspear Rebellion Quartermaster, for one Radical Mojo.  I’ve always thought that Gahz’rilla from Zul’Farrak was a cool-looking boss and this pet is a nice memento to have of that instance.  I could have picked one of Godzilla’s enemies, King Ghidorah, to name my ‘rooki, but it has no wings, so I decided on a three-headed name for the rampaging monster.

Blossoming Ancient – a pet soon to be available for purchase from the Blizzard Store.

And last, but definitely not the least, Lenneth, the Unborn Val’kyr – a rare drop that could spawn in different spots all around Northrend.  Probably the most coveted pet among all pet collectors out there, I know it was definitely mine.  It’s the closest thing to getting the winged humanoid, Mini Tyrael, without having to drop some serious cash money, unlike a certain ballin’ Tauren Druid I know =P.  There was a mystery in the beginning in how collectors were going to be able to get their hands on one of these Val’ks, but it turned out to be not so difficult to capture one, unlike the Minfernal.  Many of blogging friends can attest to this, as they were capturing it within the first week of the new patch.

It took me a few days of searching around Northrend, but I finally found her all by her lonesome, in the northwestern edge of Sholozar Basin.  She was of Poor quality, but I had a Battlestone ready to instantly fix that.  The battle almost went horribly wrong when I used my Dancing Water Skimmer to battle her first.  I used Water Jet with the intentions of slowly getting the Val’k's health down low enough for capture when the ability suddenly crit for big damage and almost one-shotted her, lol.  It took two Pristine Traps to capture her and she was finally mine, barely averting disaster.

The name Lenneth comes from one of my favorite games to come out of the original Playstation console, Valkyrie Profile.  Next to Final Fantasy VII, this was one of the best RPGs from beginning to end, imo.

from fanpop.com

I think that last image fits the pet perfectly, don’t you think? =)

So how’s your 5.3 pet collection coming along?  Got any interesting names for any of your pets?

Last week was a pretty exciting week for the Drak BMAH, as another X-51 Nether-Rocket X-TREME went up for sale.  This is the third time that I’ve seen it up there; the first one Sorak bought and the second I misjudged the time on, forgot to rebid and lost it last minute.  As the auction was nearing its close, the bids starting coming in quick, going from 60K to 90K in a matter of minutes.  I was determined not to lose for a third time and dropped 120K on it, the most I’ve ever spent on any item on the BMAH.  The bids pretty much stopped there, as people started to leave Madame Goya’s little hut.  I even stayed up late to see the auction to its end just to make sure it was mine, lol.

The X-51 Nether-Rocket is the first flying mount ever offered by the WoW TCG.  It comes from the rare loot card of the same name from the fifth set of the TCG, Servants of the Betrayer.  It is one of three loot cards from the set, with the cosmetic items Papa Hummel’s Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuit (which is similar to the Pet Biscuits you can get from the various supply bags from winning pet trainer battles) and Goblin Weather Machine – Prototype 01-B being the other two.

Owning a rocket mount was something I’ve wanted to add to my collection for while now.  I was a little too late on creating a second account to get the X-53 Touring Rocket and the Big Love Rocket is a myth, with its crazy drop rate during the Love is in the Air event.  My Death Knight is still trying to farm motes of harmony to convert to spirits to create the Depleted-Kyparium Rocket and I might have to bribe Lyss to farm for mats on her Rogue so that she could make me the Geosynchronous World Spinner, lol.

I think I’ll stick with this for a while, my gold wallet needs a break. =)

I can fly too, I think….

The original title of this post was supposed to reference head banging, but more like banging our heads against the brick wall that was Megaera for the past couple weeks, but Lyss offered a different title and I went with a variation of that, lol. More importantly, last night, the hydra finally went down!  Good job SR!

We had to do a bit of shuffling with our raid composition lately, as some guildies had to step out for various reasons.  And with summer already here and peeps wanting to take vacations, I think our raiding and progression might stall a bit.  But we’ve managed to still do well with other guildies filling in.

The raid week started off real good, with a one-shot of all the bosses, including Tortos, Tuesday night.  That gave us plenty of time to work on Megaera on Wednesday.  We tried several different strats and combinations of the fight, each one presenting a different issue.  We used the LFR strat of Green-Red-Green-Red-Green-Red-Green and another variation where we threw a Blue head in at the end, but the damage was too much for our healers and we would only manage to get to the fifth head before wiping.  We then tried a Green-Blue-Red-Green-Blue-Red-Green, but having too many Acid Rains from the Green Heads was blowing us up.

The combination that eventually worked for us was Blue-Red-Green-Blue-Red-Green-Blue.  We found it easier to deal with two of each damage type (Cinders, Torrent of Ice and Acid Rain) and minimizing the amount of Green heads we got, popping lust on the final head for the kill.

We then headed off to play with Ji-Kun for a little bit and surprisingly did quite well.  Our best attempt got the birdie down to 36% before the pools and quills killed us off.  Hopefully we can get her down next week, then we’ll finally be halfway through Throne of Thunder, lol.

Who said summer raiding progression was dead? =)

With our success with downing Megaera last week, we went back into Throne, hoping to get a new boss kill under our belts.  Tuesday night went by quick, clearing everything through Tortos, leaving Megaera for us to kill Wednesday.  We had some trouble placing/clearing the frost patches on the hydra, but we were able to get the monster down again to set up the stage for the flying avian.

I’ve only done this fight as a tank in LFR, so all my experience has been on the main platform.  I tried to listen to Adoe explain the mechanics and strat for the “Nests” team, but I got lost and just left it for them to handle, lol.

The main platform mechanics were simple:  avoid the slime puddles and Caw, pop cooldowns during Quills, try to stay on the platform for Down Draft and tank swap after two stacks of Talon Rake.  We split the platform into four quadrants and had the ranged and healers keep the slime within a single quadrant as much as possible before moving as a group to the next one.  We had the dps soak up the puddles to keep the platform clear, but not more than one or the debuff would be too much for the healers to handle.  For Quills, I used Devotion Aura as well as my own CDs to mitigate the AoE damage going out.

Down Draft is where things get a little tricky.  Ji-Kun will attempt to blow you off the platform during this ability, but if you fall off, you’ll get carried back to the top.  Immediately after Down Draft, Ji-Kun will Talon Rake the player closest to her.  So as a tank, you cannot fall off the platform and need to stay as close to her as possible.  This is where speed boosts come in handy.  Speed of Light is great for paladins to have; it’s not enough to run through Down Draft and inch back towards Ji-Kun, but it holds you in place and keeps you from getting blown off.  Just make sure to warn the other dps that can actually get through Draft with faster abilities, like Warriors *cough*Zug*cough* and Rogues *cough*Psynite*cough*, lest they get one-shotted by Talon Rake.

We made good progress on Ji-Kun all night and had a 7% wipe as we hit our raid time of 11:30 pm.  We decided to go for one more pull since we came so close and as with most infamous last pulls of the night, the big bird finally went down.

After the raid, we talked a little bit about what we wanted to do, now that we are halfway through Throne of Thunder.  One suggestion was to extend the lockout and make the push through the next half of the raid, but some said that they could still use drops off the earlier bosses.  So we’ll probably start fresh again next week, hopefully get through or up to Ji-Kun in one night, leaving Wednesday for more progression.

Next up, Durmoomoo and his annoying beam and purple badz.  I thought this fight was already bad on LFR, we’ll see how really bad it is on normal mode, lol.

Pets.  There are some pets in WoW that you just can’t get enough of.  Like the Imperial Silkworm for example.  We have a guild tab that’s almost half full of them from people doing their Imperial Silk cooldowns daily.  We would have more, but I think we’ve started to vendor them because we can’t get rid of them and they don’t sell at all on the auction house.

Then there are the rare pets, ones locked behind crazy achievements, like the Stunted Direhorn, or those that require lots of RNG luck, like the Darkmoon Eye ( I hate you, Jeremy Feasel).

And then there are the ultra-rare pets, ones that now fetch a pretty price on eBay, like the Vanilla Collector Edition pets, the Mini Diablo, Panda Cub and the Zergling.

Well, leave it to a certain Druid to come up with a crazy game for a chance at another one of those ultra-rare pets, a Mini Tyrael!

“Who you calling ‘Mini’?”

Last weekend, as part of her “Moving House Giveaway” post, Navi created a scavenger hunt where you had to search for clues found in 16 links from various blog posts in a cleaver poem she wrote and put them together.  The clues combined to form more questions to answer and once you answered those, you got your name entered into a drawing for awesome prizes.  In addition to the Mini Tyrael pet, there was a Riding Turtle mount and Gusting Grimoire to be won.

This contest was not easy at all.  I clicked on ALL the posts and ALL the links.  It took me a long time to find all the clues (I was even one of them, lol) and even longer to find out who Navi’s favorite NPC was, which took me a couple tries to get that right.

With that hard part over, it was just a matter of waiting, along with the two others that got the questions right, Cymre and Luxy, to see which prizes we would be drawn for.

And I couldn’t believe it, I got picked for Tyrael’s Hilt!  Take that, Feasel! =P

To claim my prize, I had to go and visit Edward Cairn in Undercity.  I guess they didn’t trust Landro Longshot enough to hold onto a special pet like this, haha.

With my own mini Archangel of Justice in hand, it was off to take some pics!

“You cannot judge me. I am Justice itself!”
- Diablo III

“The human blood elf spirit never ceases to amaze me.”
- Diablo III

And after our most recent Throne of Thunder kill of Ji-Kun, I decided to do a little flying myself with Mini Tyrael.

So congrats to Cym and Luxy on their prizes and thanks to Navi for an awesome, albeit crazy and difficult, contest and prize!  Now it’s time to go level this bad boy to 25!

Vanicus was nice enough to sell me her extra Darkmoon Eye last night, finally putting an end to months of farming for the pet at the Faire.  Thanks Van!

Jeremy Feasel, you will not be missed. =P

On this day one year ago, I first embarked on this blogging adventure, not really sure what to expect.  I’ve been following other people’s blogs for years and enjoyed reading what they had to say and commenting on them.  So I figured I’d join the fray, chronicling my endeavours and ones with my guildies and friends in Azeroth.

Looking back through some of my older posts, I’ve experienced and accomplished a lot.  I’ve covered everything from raiding, pvping, achievement hunting, WarFare Theater, writing about Megabloks and the WoW TCG and other miscellaneous stuff thrown in there.  I’m even wearing the same transmog now as I did in my first pic posted, haha.

So I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has visited my blog.  Thanks to my guildies and friends; without you a lot of these posts wouldn’t exist.  Thanks to all the commenters; you’ve made this blogging experience an interactive one for me.  And thanks to the even the spammers; inflating my page views always makes me feel good about my posts, haha.

So how do I celebrate this occasion?  With a gift, of course!  But let me back up for a bit and explain something related to this gift.

As my guildies and friends know, I’m big collector or pets, mounts and toys from WoW.  Quite a bit of those have been acquired from the WoW TCG, which I’ve been collecting since the first set, Heroes of Azeroth.  I enjoy sharing these toys with others, whether it’s between boss pulls waiting for afkers or just hanging out in Org or the Shrine. Van has even made posts about them and given them their own tag, lol.  Because of my penchant for these toys, Telanarra changed my guild note a while back:

Because of that note, others started referring me by the Dark Knight’s name.  Van called me Batman in a post that she made where we downed the Council of Elders for the first time with me solo-tanking the bosses.  Cym even turned me into the caped crusader by coming up with an awesome mog and moniker, which you can also see on the sidebar.  I even paid tribute by making a WarFare Theater post with him in it.

So what gift did I get?  I got the Arvman his Arvwing, of course, lol.

And since I was already at the store, I went ahead and picked up one of those perennial miniature trees, a Blossoming Ancient.

To further celebrate this day, I’m going to give a Bloodwing and two Blossoming Ancients to three lucky readers.  If you already have the bat or the tree, then you can substitute it for any other mount or pet from the Blizz store.  All you have to do is leave a comment, explaining what superhero, or supervillain, your Warcraft character would most resemble.  Your name will be thrown into my Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron (or hat), where the wifey will pick out three winners at random.  All comments must be made by Wednesday, July 26th at 10PM EST.  Good luck to all!

Thanks to everyone for commenting on my bloggerversary post, it was definitely a fun topic to discuss.  =)

Without further ado, here are the lucky winners:

The Armored Bloodwing goes to…

…Cain!  Congrats!

And the two Blossoming Ancients go to…

…Jojo and Lyss!  Congrats to you both!

I will be sending out the prizes soon, once I can track you guys down, except Lyss of course, lol

I also tallied all the responses and Marvel came out of top with eight superheroes selected and DC was second with four.  Wonder Woman was the most picked superhero with three and I still can’t believe Slice picked a character from the My Little Pony universe, lol.

Congrats to all the winners!

This week has been a pretty awesome one for me in WoW.  I celebrated one year of blogging on Monday, got a new medal with the CMN and a new PvP accomplishment (both that will highlighted in posts soon).  And to top it all off, a new boss kill in Throne of Thunder, Durumu the Forgotten! Woohoo!

Tuesday was a blast as we smashed through the first six bosses with relative ease.  We had Tyledres and me tanking, Slice, Zarm and Van healing and Sorak, Zug, Psynite, Shadeey and Adoe as dps.  After killing Ji-Kun, we had time to try a couple pulls on Durumu, which went really bad, lol.  We decided to call it there and had everyone watch a video or read up on the fight in preparation for the next night.

Our raid changed a little bit Wednesday, as Shadeey stepped out and Wok came in to tank with me and Tyle went dps.  I think everyone had done their homework and watched at least a video of the fight, so we were pretty eager to start.

For the first part of the fight, we made sure to drop the Lingering Gaze shadow pools as far away from the middle of the room as possible to give melee room to maneuver, since we were pretty melee heavy.  Force of Will is another mechanic we had to manage, if you don’t get out of it fast enough, you get blasted off the platform and instantly die, like several people, including myself, did.  It was a bit entertaining though, I think Wok wins with the most frequent filer miles accumulated, lol.

Wok and I got to play tank swap with Serious Wound, making sure to taunt off every five stacks.  There is another debuff that tanks get, Arterial Cut, which can only be removed by being healed to maximum health.

After about 30 seconds, the second part of the fight begins and the beams of light appear.  We split the raid among the beams to share the damage taken from them; tanks followed the yellow beam, healer stayed on the blue and dps kited the red beam around, hunting down the Crimson Fog adds.   Like Khizzara mentioned in one of my previous posts, we did not reveal the Azure Fog add with the blue beam.  It hurt a lot when we did, lol.  Adoe and Zug marked the locations of the Crimson Fogs with raid markers, so the person with control of the red beam would know where to find them.

Once that phase was over, we had a few seconds to dps Durumu before we went into the dreaded Disintegration Beam/Eye Sores part of the fight. We stacked on the beam when it appeared and once we saw the squiggly purple lines indicating the start of the maze, we quickly moved over and either stacked on Zug or Adoe to lead us through it.  With all the prior nerfs to this mechanic, the beam seemed to move a lot slower than it did, even from LFR, which allowed us to find the open spots and avoid the Eye Sores.

After that is over, the fight starts all over again, with the Force of Will, Lingering Gaze, Serious Wound, etc.  There is one new mechanic that is added to the fight at this point, Life Drain.  When someone is hit with Life Drain, Durumu begins to heal himself and that person becomes stunned and can only be broken out if someone else steps in front of them to take the beam.  We had trouble with this at first, as we would cut the beam too close to Durumu, eventually to the point where we couldn’t intercept the beam as it ran its full course.

We spent all night on Durumu, slowly learning and tweaking our strat on every attempt.  We had some good 40% attempts and even a sub 10% one and some annoying Force of Will mishap wipes.  The magic happened on our 21st try, when everyone executed everything perfectly with no deaths, finally knocking that giant eye out for the count.

We called it a night afterwards, but not before Van and I raced through the bloods leading up to Primordius to get a shot at him.  I made it to his room and tried to get an Avenger’s Shield off to hit him with, but the bloods just overwhelmed me.  Next time Primordius, I’m coming back with more friends, lol.

Someone mentioned solo tanking and two healing the fight, which would make the kill go quicker.  I’m all about solo tanking this fight and ready…as long as the healers are ok with it, lol.

Going into Wednesday night, I honestly didn’t think we would down Durumu, based on the different mechanics involved and how much of a pain the maze was in LFR.  I figured it would take at least 50 or more attempts, but my team proved me wrong and everyone definitely stepped up to the plate and brought their A-game last night.  Hopefully we can keep this momentum going next week and get ourselves a Primordius kill. =)