One of those weekends, &c.

I had the casa to myself on Friday night and I was determined to over-imbibe that night before I had to trudge off to an… interesting… wedding the next day. To help me along in my personal goals, we convened a drunk raiding night. The initial plan was Blackwing Lair (to get Gulliveig the Broodlord’s head), then BT for rep and a shot at some cool Illidan items, then whatever else we had time for before we pared the raid down to 10 people and went to wrap up the three achievements a few folks needed to get their Uld10 drakes.

Because we were starting with BWL, of course a group of unattuned folks had to do the caravan through UBRS and the Rend event. I don’t know if anyone’s done this lately, but the bane of these trips has been that if you kill Rend before he jumps off his dragon, the event bugs and you need to reset the instance. Thankfully, we didn’t pull that this time!

Once finally in BWL we quickly shot through the whole place in like 30 minutes. My person interest in the place is limited to the remaining three pieces of T2 I need–boots, belt, chest. A few folks needed the achievement, and I think someone else wanted the Elementium. In any case, it was a smooth run and in no time at all we were porting to Shatt and flying off for Karabor.

The transit apparently proved troublesome for a few of us. Those with the Touring Rockets decided to dump their passengers, so while yours truly is like a cat with buttered toast on his back, Anafielle was not as lucky.

Splat.

I’m currently really liking Black Temple. It’s huge but not drawn out. Boss fights are still somewhat interesting (I say this as someone who never ran the place in TBC), and a complete run has a Goldilocks duration. Plus the stuff off of Illidan is pretty awesome–the blindfold, the shield I covet, the creepy staff, etc. I think it took us about 90 minutes to burn through the place, and once the Betrayer hugged the floor, we decided to dodge to Silithus for an AQ40 run. Because, why not?

Once we were done re-enacting Starship Troopers and I was satisfied with pissing everyone off by constantly asking in a drunken manner, “Is this the gauntlet? How about now?!” we then finally broke down to a 10man to get some folks their drakes. I wasn’t planning for this to take very long, so I told the five that had to drop group to hang around and we’d run Hyjal or something after. 20 minutes, tops.

Anyway, while the 10 of us ran Orbituary, Disarmed, and Iron Dwarf, Medium Rare, Anafielle was passed out on her keyboard. And then there were 14!

Once the Ulduar fun ended we headed over to Hyjal and steamrolled through the place. After Archimonde fell, I realized it was way past my bed time and staggered off to wake up early the next morning, hungover, for my drive to the wedding.

The bug hunt

On Sunday, after having run AQ40 the other day, I noticed my reputation with the Brood of Nozdormu was around 31640/36000, within spitting distance of the next level and putting me one step closer to being able to really start the Scepter quest chain. So I flew down to Silithus to cash in my stockpile of Qiraji Lord Insignias and hopefully push it to neutral. As I was clicking through the multiple goes of the repeatable quest, I watched my reputation slowly trudge up to maxing out Hated.

After cashing them all in I was at 35640/36000. When I was done blubbering like a girl, I went back to farming carapaces.

Finally, 10 agonizing minutes later I had the 200 I needed, turned them and prepared for that delicious green swirl of neutrality.

Wait… that’s not right… Neutral is after… no… not more carapaces… NOT MORE CARAPACES.

/flex

I’m not much of a pvper, but when accidentally opening up the pvp window I noticed that it was AV weekend. So, on a whim I jumped into a match which was about to start. Someone asked in /bg who was the tank. Some guy in 232 gear speaks up first, but since I have a chip on my shoulder since the last time I was in AV, I volunteered as well. Some guy must have inspected us both, because he immediately decreed that I was tank.

We zerged right up to Vann, skipping the mage at the halfway point. Looks like Alliance was doing the same, because I never heard them engage our midway guy-person. Like I said, I never do battlegrounds. I don’t know these names.

Anyway, we get to Vann, I check to make sure people are behind me and I pull. 30 seconds later Vann went down, the results screen came up and yours truly was top damage done. Gogo aoe damage on five mobs at once.

Team Rocket Alpha Snowflake strikes back

We run two ICC-10 heroic groups on Sunday, which jokingly have adopted the names Team Rocket Alpha Snowflake and Team Bravo Sunshine Ponies, if I have those right. My team (Alpha) started an hour late because the second tank forgot we were raiding. Ana’s team meanwhile continued their lockout from last week, on time, which had gotten the guild-first kill of Saurfang 10H last week.

Swearing revenge, Team Alpha responded by spending ten attempts on the same fight while Bravo went to work on heroic Putricide. Finally, after about an hour we knocked over Saurfang.

Alas, Bravo managed to match our previous heroic kills (Fester, Rotface, and BQL) and then one-up us with Dreamwalker. While the rivalry flares up I’m just happy the guild is getting these progression kills. I’m a softy like that. Nonetheless, next week Alpha is prepared to take back the crown.

And, in other news, I really, really need to do strategy posts for heroic fights.