Back to the Wulf!

Well last night's Kara with the early shift was interesting. We cleared seven bosses in one evening with no noticable difficulty. Moroes and The Maiden of Virtue managed to confound me by dropping long saught-after tanking items that Ulu would have loved. Still I'm chuffed for the warrior who got them.

That said The Oz event (first time I've seen an opera event that wasn't big Bad Wolf) dropped some nice shoulders for Wulf, the Curator dropped the token for his Tier 4 Gloves and the Shade of Aran dropped a nice Cloak for him! On top of all that, Wulf got Honored with the Violet Eye and got an epic Ring.

I should start bringing my Hunter to raids more often...

Kara and a return to DPS.

I was bored before Karazhan last night, so I tried to get a group together to zerg through Arcatraz. I ended up with Ulu, another Paladin (who I thought was Holy, but turned out to be DPS specced), a Rogue, a DPS Shaman and a Feral Druid. Notice what was missing? That's right, primary healers. After some humming and hawing, I got my healing gear out the bank and with some support from the Paladin and Shaman, we healed our way through the instance with only a few deaths,

After that, it was time for the CD Late Shift to go try Kara. We cleared and took down Attumen fairly easily, but after that we spent the rest of the night making about a 7-8 attempts on Moroes. It was a difficult fight with our composition and ultimately we called it a night from that point. There's an aftermath thread here that denotes the various problems we had, and it has a lot of backseat raiders saying the same things over and over again.

Tonight it's the turn of the Early Shift to give it a go. Given the shortage of sign-ups for that run, I've decided to drag Wulfsblood out of semi-retirement to give it a go. I've respecced him to Trapbitch after a brief flirtation with a Marksmanship build. We'll see how it goes I guess.

Karazhan Last Night.

Prince Malechazar 2 - Ulushnar 0.

*sigh*

We'll get him down one day!

Well it's been a while since I updated. There's been some wanky stuff going on within Chaotic Divinity which will inevitably lead to one of it's internal shifts. Riding that wave hasn't been altogether fun. Still, on with the show:

First of all, Patch 2.1.2 arrived on Wednesday and they fixed the dorky look of my main tanking helm:



Thursday saw me run Karazhan with a group of people who comprise our "late shift", folks centred around the UK who generally look to start around 21:00 Game Time. They'd been struggling for the last few weeks, so I decided to go help them for a change.

The group was by no means perfect, and they were obviously less experienced, but we still managed to kill Attumen and Moroes on the first night.

Friday night and Saturday were spent doing various Heroics and other instances with friends. It's all something of a blur at this point, upshot is that no loot dropped that Ulu needed and he ended up with thirty of the fifty badges for the helm he's saving for.

Saturday Night was back to Karazhan. We went in and killed Big Bad Wolf (again!) and The Curator with no problems. We made about five attempts on the Shade of Aran to no avail before giving up and going to the Chess event. After the chess, we went back to give Aran one more try before calling it a night, and we killed him! Ulu got a nice set of Healing Shoulders and a decent Tanking ring from him.

Sunday afternoon, I went to help Adventure Lovers in Gruul's Lair. As the best-geared tank there, I was given the job of tanking High-King Maulgar. There were a lot of wipes, and it's a hideously complex fight to learn. I was struck again about how much Raid Tanking's like a rollercoaster ride. You hold on tight and pray to god your healers are good. I'd estimate at least 75% of the Tank's job is done before the fight: getting good gear and ensuring it's enchanted/gemmed to it's fullest potential. The rest is down to getting the mob in the right position, and generating enough hate to keep him on you. We didn't get him down in the end, but it was an exhilarating experience.

After that, I did a few 5-man runs with CDers until late. My last run was in Steamvaults where, after about two-dozen runs, I finally managed to get Ulu what is arguably the best pre-raid Tanking tanking cape in the game.

Tonight is Kara again, and I go to face the Prince!

The Birds!

Well last night, I helped a Druid friend of mine complete his Epic Flight Form quest with a run to Heroic Sethekk Halls. We had a good group for it, a Mage, a Priest, a Rogue, the Druid and Ulu.

It ended up taking about an hour and a half to clear. We died a few times, but generally, the instance didn't feel too hard. Then again we were a well-geared and experienced group who were used to raiding together.

The quest itself involved summoning a third boss after you've cleared and killed the second one. The boss itself is arguably the easiest boss in the instance.



Still it was a fun evening and another three badges towards the Faceguard of Determination. That's me got 20 badges banked and I "only" need another 30!