Raiding

Been raiding a LOT lately, and I am quite happy about that!

Our guild [Adaptation] has made an alliance with another guild called The Commonwealth. We've been doing Naxx-25 pretty successfully with them last week. I say 'pretty' as it was filled with many wipes, but that was to be expected. =)

We almost had a full clear but some PUG ninja'd our raid ID and killed Kel'thuzad. We will have to be more selective about who we group with in the future, unfortunately.

In the meantime, we hit up 25-man Flame Leviathan in Ulduar and downed him. Got some people loot.

I've gotten a break from tanking, and have been playing my shaman, which was very nice. I missed DPSing - it is so mindless. Just keybind + faceroll and you're good to go!

Tonight our guild is heading back into Ulduar-10 for the first time in weeks [hopefully!], so I will be back to tanking again. Hope I'm not too rusty.

In other news, I got Manatee her Crusader title - FINALLY - so I am all set for patch 3.2. Bring on the new looooots! She's also got 3/5 of the tourney pets. Just need to save marks for an Elwynn Lamb and an Ammen Vale Lashling now. I guess I should get my Horde priest levelled up some so I can start working on grabbing the Horde pets, too. In due time!

Patch 3.2, OMG

So, after reading WoW.com's post about the 3.2 Patch Notes, I think I am even more excited for this patch than I was for the last one. I'll highlight some things that made me squee.

Isle of Conquest - New battleground omg! It looks like it's going to be a mix of Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley kind of? Grabbing nodes and storming the Keep to kill the General. Sounds pretty cool. I do like to take a break from alt-grinding to PVP so I am excited to try this out.
While on the subject of PVP: They are adding experience gains into battlegrounds. Awesome. And to keep twinks from QQing, they are allowing them to opt out of exp gains - but they will only be able to fight against other twinks if they do. HA. Being that my lowest toon is 50 now it's kind of too late for me to really, really enjoy this, but all the same - it's about time.

Better accessability - As a player of both factions [though I do spend more time Alliance side], I was pleased to see the Horde were getting a long-needed zeppelin to Thunder Bluff. Alliance have their Deeprun Tram to tie things together, but Horde still had to run across Mulgore and through the Barrens if they wanted to get from TB to Orgrimmar/vice-versa. Also, they're adding portals to the Dark Portal in SW/Org, I think it was, so that's awesome too. And mailboxes galore! No more having to deal with idiots parking their mammoths/elekks/kodos on the mailboxes outside the bank. =P I used to envy the amount of mailboxes smattered around Silvermoon City while I was playing the auction house.

Emblem changes - They are adding yet another tier of Emblems for the "hardcore" raiders, and my first thought before reading on was that it was getting a bit out of hand. Then I read that Emblems of Conquest would be rewarded through instances like 10-man Naxxramas and even... HEROICS? What! That's awesome! I forsee an instance zerg in the future for my guild. Gearing people up even moreso will really help us push forward in Ulduar. I just want to *see* Yogg-Saron - I don't want it to be like in Burning Crusade where Wrath was being launched and I hadn't even seen the Illidan encounter, QQ. I am very happy with how Blizzard is doing things this time around. Yes, hardcores will QQ, but the game was meant to be played by everyone, not just them. Whose needs are more important and why? The answer is no one's. Everyone pays the same $15 / month. And Blizzard wants to keep the huge player base rolling in the dough. Sorry, dudes.

VANITY ITEMS - OK, so, I am a complete pet collector. [Mounts to a lesser extent. Much lesser. But I digress.] There are SO MANY new vanity items coming in the next patch! 8 new non-combat pets, NOT INCLUDING Argent Tournament pets, zomg! Children's Week will also be coming to Northrend - at least I hope it makes it to live realms, past the PTR - I REALLY want a baby wolvar pet, and a baby gorloc too.
Aside from pets, they are making the Silver Covenant and Sunreaver flying mounts purchaseable with Champion Seals, AND a new paladin-only Argent Crusade Charger. More incentive to level my Paladin, basically. ;)
Horde will also be getting the long-anticipated Ravasaur mount, which is their version of the Wintersaber from Winterspring.
Along with that, new tabard and banners, and an upgraded Argent Squire who can actually run errands for you... System overload here srsly.

I need a break! Phew! More later!

As I was saying...

PROGRESSION!

I am so proud of my guild, once again! We downed TWO new bosses in Ulduar last night.

The first was XT-002 Deconstructor, finally. We really pulled it together, and killed him in one shot, after being stuck on him for the past couple of weeks. We even managed to snag the Nerf Gravity Bombs achievement.



The second boss we encountered was Kologarn.



I have to say, it was an absolutely awesome feeling stepping up onto that walkway where he pops up. The sheer size of him - especially to me, a gnome! - was genuinely awe-inspiring. I really felt like an "important" part of the game at that point, lame as it might sound! I really missed gigantic raid bosses.

As you can see, my guildies kind of shared the feeling. ...Kind of.



Our first attempt went, uhh... Not so good. But it was a learning experience! Also, the fact that he yells "YOU FAIL!" when someone dies made me laugh a lot.



Our second attempt went a lot better, once we figured out that we needed to have the raid DPS his right arm to death [sidenote: he yells "Just a flesh wound!" when you kill it, also hilarious], and the subsequent earth elemental adds it spawns when it crumbles [after I pick them up!], before moving on to DPS him. We ignored his left arm completely; healers just healed through the raid damage while everyone dodge pew-pew eye laz0rz.
Our MT Wakizashi stayed on Kologarn; if you do not have someone on him at all times, he casts Petrifying Breath and wipes the raid. There is a stacking armor sundering debuff he does to your tank, and you are supposed to have two tanks taunt between stacks [ala Gluth], but he never had a problem with it, and our healers did not complain about having trouble keeping him up - so I just focused on picking up adds. I stayed in tank gear just in case, as I usually do, but coupled with my Unholy DPS spec to help with the arm a bit instead. Rinse and repeat, because the arm respawns every 60 seconds. It seemed to work pretty well for us.

[Some pictures I took as I was grabbed, just as our DPS finished off the arm]:





So I suppose we'll be sticking to that strategy, because we killed him!



I am going to speak with the other officers and see about returning to Ulduar on Friday, so we can maybe have a go at Auriaya and/or Iron Council.

OH OH! I also picked up Ironsoul from Flame Leviathan. How could I forget to mention?! OMG so sexy!

PROGRESSION!

XT-002 Deconstructor AND Kologarn down!!!

Deconstructor one-shot this time around, Kologarn down in two attempts!

GREAT job Adaptation raiders! You rock! Iron Council and Auriaya next!!!

I will post pictures tomorrow, Argurios took some awesome kill shots and put them on our guild website though! Check 'em out!

Great success!

So, yesterday, my good friend Bruzin fished up the Giant Sewer Rat pet, and I was insanely jealous.



Once I saw that the pet was the size of his toon, Underfoot, though, I was instantly over it, and just had to laugh. Too perfect!

Well, since RNG seemed to be in his favour, Bruzin, Lumpey and I went off to clear a couple of instances in hopes of obtaining mounts for one of us. We hit up Heroic: Sethekk Halls [twice!], but Anzu wasn't having that. Then we went to ZG.

Hakkar, the ugliest parrot-snake on Azeroth, made sure his brainwashed High Priests didn't deliver us any phat loot, either.



Tomorrow is another day right? And how! As it turns out, the RNG Old Gods are smiling upon me today! [Today being yesterday's tomorrow, of course.]

I was doing the fishing daily today, as I try to do every day, and chatting about the new Battle-Bots promotion Mountain Dew Game Fuel and Battle.net are doing, with my MT Wakizashi.

[Let us pause here to bask in the glory of the Battle-Bot. I chose blue fuel today, but I'll get some red fuel tomorrow for my Hordies!]



Anyway, I ALMOST hit escape on this freaking loot box as I was typing a long-winded message. I would have kicked myself in the butt all day if I did, so glad I didn't, because it had THIS in it!



Yay, rats all around!

So, I had no luck fishing up any more rats for my other toons, but I DID get not one, but TWO Strand Crawlers today in the Fishing Bags! Woot!! One for my mage, and one for my pally.



I also fished this up on my priest yesterday... Not a pet but still nifty.



Tonight, we hit up Ulduar once again. Hopefully we can down XT-002 Deconstructor! Crossing my fingers and toes!

FOOTNOTE: I've been asked how to procure the adorable Battle-Bot pet, and this is how you do it: First, go to the Mountain Dew Game Fuel site. Let the flash animation load. There will be a button that says "Claim now and fuel up!" with a little Battle-Bot on it. Click that and sign into your Battle.net account. DON'T WORRY, IT'S SAFE! It's the genuine Battle.net site. You MUST have merged your World of Warcraft account with a Battle.net account to be able to obtain the pet. When you get to the confirmation screen, you must log out of WoW ENTIRELY [not just to the character select screen], and then log back in. Voila! It should be in your mailbox in-game. =)
After you have your pet, you may subsequently log into the site once a day, using the same instructions here, to acquire fuel for your pet in the colour of your choosing [between either red or blue.] Fuel up your bot, find someone with one of the opposite colour, and BATTLE!

The Usual? I

Phew, I need to update more often! Instead of making one giant, long-winded post, I'm going to break things up into two posts.

Post the first: Raiding!



My guildmates and I finally ventured back into Ulduar on Wednesday, and I have to tell you, it feels really good to actually be working on progression again. I am getting kind of sick of Naxx, admittedly, and I really don't want Adaptation to get stuck in the same 10-man for an entire expansion like Semper Invictus did.

We downed Flame Leviathan with little trouble. I still love that fight, even if I go splat an awful lot! GET TO DA CHOPPA!



Our second order of business was to tackle the XT-002 Deconstructor. The boss's voice is one of the best in the game, in my opinion. He has a spot in my heart right up there with Talon -King Ikiss. [TRINKETSSSSss, pretty trinkets! CA-CAWWWWW!]



We haven't downed him yet, but we had a few very close attempts. One at 11% and two at 4%, I believe. [Correct me if I'm wrong, guys!] We had issues with the adds, and my most favourite MT in the whole wide world Wakizashi was getting his butt handed to him, basically! We changed a few things around that seemed to work better, such as me tanking the elite adds in tank gear but my Unholy DPS spec, which worked out quite well for the most part, in that I was able to actually kill them on my own. That was good, because it let our DPS focus on the boss the whole time, mostly. I'm sure if we pull ourselves together we'll down him in no time, then it's off to Iron Council + Kologarn, and then we take over the world! Okay, maybe not that last part.

Last night, we headed into Naxx, since we kind of switched scheduling that with Ulduar. It went pretty well, all things considered. I have to say I never realized exactly how much I relied on Deadly Boss Mods. It makes life SO much easier when raiding, especially tanking. [Although I honestly can't even fathom healers running a boss like Loatheb without DBM, either.] Since my MT Waki was not present, we pulled another guildie still fairly new to raiding along with us, and he apparently does not run any mods. It was a learning experience for me too, since I had to figure out how to explain fights to him without referring to DBM. Hahahaha. He did well, though. [Especially when I kept dying on freaking Anub'rekhan, but let's not talk about that any more.]

I think tonight we're going to try to finish up Naxx, provided everyone is online. Our old [literally] GM, Ziri, is back from her hiatus too so she hasn't even seen the end of Naxx. She doesn't know what she's in for! If only we had a frost mage so we could make her go splat on Sapphiron.

Here is a bonus picture of my husband posing with his repair bot + Lil' Smokey. You can see dead Grobbulus in the background. [Also it kind of looks like his pet is named Lil' Snooky. Aww!]

Yay raiding!

I love raiding. More specifically, I love raiding with my guild. Even when it's a wipefest on progression attempts, we still manage to have fun.

Tonight, we finished up in Naxxramas, and had a very good run, at that. We one-shot every boss except Gluth, which was only because our designated zombie-kiter died early in the first attempt. It happens!

The person in question doing the kiting was my husband, who plays a hunter called Biggun. He gets a little frustrated when he's having trouble keeping the zombies together, but it proved to be worth it for him. When we finally got to and downed Kel'Thuzad, his [Nerubian Conqueror] dropped, something he's been coveting basically since we started running Naxx. So, grats to him!

Since our raiding night ended a little earlier than scheduled, what with us trucking along so nicely and all, we decided to head into Ulduar for our second-ever time and try it out. This time, we downed Flame Leviathan without a single wipe, even on trash. Pretty cool, considering we all kind of run around like chickens with our heads cut off during that encounter.

One of the best parts of being a tank, imo... We get designated to the choppers.




OMG, Snooky! Put your helmet on!




Much better.

Also, a friend/guildie of mine got a really weird achievement mid-instance:



Umm, okay. I have heard of that happening in Ulduar though, so I wonder if it's just because it's connected to the siege vehicles? Probably.

We did make a couple of attempts at Ignis, but it was a bit too chaotic for us at that point. Still having issues with trash, and I need to work on kiting the adds better. Once they turned molten, they just ran away from me! Lrn2threatpersecond, offtank.



[Yeah, that little speck helping to lead the charge is my gnomish self.]

All in all though it was a really good night. I'm so proud of my guild, we've come so far together! Here's to more epic loots, you guys. You rock!