Looooonnngggg Weekend

Having a fairly normal 9-5 type job I had the luxury of having Thursday and Friday off giving me a nice long 4 day weekend. The RL stuff was pretty typical going to my Uncles for some turkey on Thursday and then going to my parents Saturday for some decorating of the Christmas tree. Ok... so my sister and mother mostly decorated... while the rest of us sat and watched... Star Trek.

Anyway the rest of my RL weekend was pretty uneventful which of course means I spent a lot of time on WoW. My wife found out one of her old high school friends plays WoW and so we both created characters on Nordrassil. Wilderness my brand new female Orc hunter is currently level 14 questing in the Ghostlands, because I've never leveled a blood elf but wanted to experience the lore rich zone. My wife also created a hunter... a male blood elf and the 2 of us together literally destroy everything before us. My wife has been spending more time playing her hunter then me but meh whatever playing a low level hunter is boring when I have an 80 hunter.

Speaking of which I had a lot of fun doing Arena on Arravis with Kobeck's druid Averlexis. We did most of our games last night bringing our rating from 500 something to 1100 which means that I can pick up the furious helm. Before the games I splurged and picked up the Furious legs with arena points and then bought the Furious Shoulders with emblems of Triumph that I had piling up. All in all I'm sitting on 596 resilience so I'm getting there. On the raiding front for Arravis I did Ony 10/25, and ToC 10 man. Still without a good 2h weapon... I swear the weapon upgrades I really need never drop.

Which of course leads to Saravid. I did a TON of raiding on my shaman. I ran VoA 10/25, ToC 10/25, Ony 10/25. So pretty much everything. I got a pair of legs out of ToC 25 for my enhancement set... but I can't really spare the hit to use them not to mention they have armor pen.... and would break my tier 8 bonus. So for now they are sitting in my bags. Most of the raids I ran as enhancement, but I did go as resto when I ran with Phired's guild (one of the regular tanks in or 25 man's) when we did ToC 10. Duo healing with a disc priest was a lot of fun and we cleared ToC without incident. Which was good considering they run starting at midnight... (east coast server west coast guild) and it was Sunday night.

My mage went through VoA 25 and ToGC 10. VoA was funny because the raid had 4 mages... and all 4 of us were at the top of the charts. Korolarn of course dropped nothing useable by us... but then the next 2 bosses all dropped tier gear that none of us needed. ToGC we ran Wednesday night and went through beasts and Jarraxus with only a little difficulty. That of course brought us up against faction champions for the second time. We didn't have any kind of solid strategy and the comp we were up against certainly didn't favor what we brought to the table. I still thought we did well though and on one attempt we killed off 2 of them before wiping. No upgrades dropped (sensing a trend?).

Well after we finished our last attempt on Faction Champs some people had to go and the rest of us swapped out some peeps to go run through ToC 10 reg. Cassi switched from her uber hunter to totally undergeared DK and I switched to my warrior. Hour later and we were done. I picked up a nice tanking neck but still no upgrades I really need... like a freaking shield to replace my crest of lordearon from CoS heroic. Anyway Sunday while I was doing Arena on Arravis I got a whisper from Curinir one of my old guildies and good friend. He was looking for a tank to finish up some of the later parts of Ulduar and wanted to know if I would be interested. I wasn't sure at the time but 2 hours later when the raid was about to go down I figured I had nothing better to do.

The Ulduar raid happened to be a Guild run for Serendipity... my old guild. The old guild leader (who put into place stupid rules leading to my leaving) had quit the game and now my friend and old druid mentor was the Guild Leader. I really had fun playing with some of my old guildies and hope that I can do more runs with them... while still being in a different guild. Anyway... we had Thorim, Hodir, and mimiron still up and they went down in that order. Thorim was a one shot... damn tanking in the arena as a warrior is freaking hectic. Hodir I went Arms and let Nikkyo the bear tank take Hodir. Took us 3 attempts before we got him due to people getting frozen. I wasn't one of them but I was curious and found out that if you are in the middle of bladestorm while the freezing thingy goes off that you won't get frozen.

Mimiron took a bunch of attempts, usually people (including myself, stupid shock blast) dying to stupid stuff. I was tanking the head during phase 3/4 and eating bomb bots om nom nom. With Mimiron dead... we headed to General Vezax. I LOVE the journey down to his room. Some of the people in the raid hadn't been this far in Ulduar... as we were headed down I announced that THIS is why ToC was such a disappointment to so many raiders. Icecrown better be worth the wait. But I digress, General Vezax is the furthest I have ever been in Ulduar before and have never killed him. On top of that I had never done the fight as a tank. So here I was getting ready to stand toe to toe with a boss that could easily kill me and the raid if I wasn't careful.

First attempt went pretty well all things considered and we got him down to 1 mil health. Ethren who is one of the best rogues I know in the game did an incredible job of interrupting of interrupting the flame thingy. I had 2 or 3 interrupts to his 20 and we only had one go off on an attempt because one of the mages was a little overzealous and pulled the boss out of range. I would use shield wall through the big shadowy thingy and run like a little girl when my cd's were er... on cd.

On our 4th attempt the big lobster finally died! I have to say that this is one of my favorite fights so far to tank. Having to watch everything and be ready to run for your life while still putting out as much threat as humanly possible combines all the elements that make a fight great. I was about to start using the 1h dps sword that I had gotten from Anuberak( that I use for PvP ) just to kick out extra threat.

Lanora did ToC 10 and VoA 10... and thats about it for raiding. Llina, Jadedfury, and Skillet got almost no attention. Perhaps when Icecrown comes out.

As an aside... how is it that most of my toons raiding the current tier only got one paragraph each... but I easily wrote 4 paragraphs on just Ulduar? A raid that offers absolutely nothing in terms of gear upgrades... but feels more exciting then ToC and Ony?

Progress in Ulduar.

It has been awhile since I've updated but a quite a bit has been going on. I'm not going to go into too much detail because... well like I said its been awhile and a lot has been going on...

My 10 man group finally downed Mimiron last night and I'm really glad we did since the new patch came out today! As an elemental shaman I was assigned to tank the head during phase 3 and 4... and I found out last night during our kill that grounding totem works!

Being able to shave off 9k damage every 15 seconds helped a lot when 2 of our healers died to the laser barrage thing. I mostly just healed myself for the last 30 seconds of the fight trying to give our lone remaining resto druid a chance to keep everyone else alive. I have to give props to Zolair he did a great job keeping up the raid.

I didn't take any pictures of the kill... because well... I didn't even think about it I was so excited to finally have him down. What I did take screen shots of though... was the trip down to see General Vezax. I knew there was little chance of us killing him but just the high spirits of the group and the awesome visuals of the trip down really put me in a good mood last night.

Anyway here are some screenshots of the journey down... I hope to get back in there when I'm on my own to really take every inch of the place in.

Ooooo pretty

I'm not the greatest at taking screenshots in the world. This weekend though I finally saw something I've been looking forward too since I saw the release video for Ulduar. The train. When I saw the moving train in the video I knew that I had to see it first hand. Well Sunday saw our first attempts on Mimiron 10 man (after we wiped on the trash a few times) and I got to ride the train!

Our best attempt saw him into the last phase which I was pretty happy about. I have to say right now our biggest problem was getting our tank to survive the Plasma Blasts. Monday night they went back in (wife said no raiding for me QQ) but couldn't get past phase 2. People kept dying to the rockets... they were saying the ground effect wasn't showing up. Anyone else know if that is a typical bug? Anyway.... after the raid on Sunday I rode back and forth on the train a few times and took some pics.

I love the architecture in Ulduar especially like the pic below which is of the ceiling at the end of the platform. Its like all of Ulduar is one giant breathing living machine.So yeah... when you get to the end of the track, the train lifts up and rotates around which is pretty freaking awesome... only no one in our group knew that. We had a few people who were slow getting off the train miss the jump and fall to their deaths. Since the portal there isn't up till you engage Mimiron I volunteered to kill myself "in the name of science" and proceeded to chain lightning mimiron.

After thinking about it though I should have ran around and pushed the button to put him into hardmode... oh well maybe next time!

This last one you can see where the tunnel is kind of broken apart. I jumped off the train to see if the hole was really there... but alas it was just an invisible ground. I didn't die instantly but when I was repositioning I must have triggered something because I fell over dead. Still I thought this view was pretty cool looking.