It’s been nearly two weeks since my last post (woops, vacation last week!) and there have been a few excellent developments in BT’s raiding dance card. We’ve managed to keep our excellent farm night pace, easily clearing the first 6 bosses in 2 hours. Not to get too far ahead of myself, but last week on farm night we almost did 7 bosses before end of raid, pulling Durumu once about a minute before the 11:30 end time.

Didn’t work out, but it was definitely worth the shot!

And speaking of Durumu, last Monday we had an amazing progression night, knocking off both Durumu and Primordius in the same two hour period. Durumu wasn’t too bad at all; we started the night with some excellent pulls, and despite a few flubs with the maze and our color-blind, contrast-impaired raid leader, it was immediately apparent we had a solid shot at a quick kill.

A few more attempts later and Durumu was taking his little nap in the center of the room. (He is napping… right?)

It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to kill Durumu, because I distinctly remember feeling really excited that we had a good amount of time to attempt to get Primordius as well. As we worked through the trash, Chronis (who also raids with Apotheosis as their brewmaster tank) was giving us a run down on how he dislikes the zerg/Patchwerk strategy for the fight, which I immediately began chanting for. Sure, it’s cheap, but that boss has a shield on its loot table, so all bets were off.

I can see why Chronis hated it though, the zerg strategy really is boring to execute for just about everyone except the healers. You just stand there and whittle away at the boss and try not to do anything interesting. Perfectly okay for squeaking out a first kill (well one may argue convincingly that it’s especially not ok in that case) but I hope we get to do the fight as intended in the future. If only for the haste buffs.

The next few weeks raiding will be pretty low-key, I think. I’m traveling for work all next week, depriving the guild of a second tank. So there’s the crushing Catholic guilt, of course. Hopefully I won’t kneecap our momentum.

Three’s a crowd

Also last week I managed to finally get my mage to ding 90, after letting him stew at halfway through 89 for far too long. I’d been leveling him with Dan as a social thing, so neither of us wanted to level without the other and our non-raiding WoW time just wasn’t syncing up. Finally he ended up deciding that he hated the warrior he was leveling and instead picked up an old Warlock that was sitting at 80 (if I’m remembering that detail right).

So I finally just bit the bullet and did the hour of questing that would push the mage over the edge and to the level cap.

This is a huge new frontier for me. I’ve never had a third level capped character before. Though, to be fair, I don’t even log into the druid anymore even just to do Halfhill farming. At first I thought my general malaise with the druid meant I just didn’t like alting, but the mage proved that quite wrong.

I am loving the new gear grind for this character and all the possibilities that are laid out before him. I’m also enjoying learning to play the character correctly. It’s been a real blast thus far.

Now that Dan is on his warlock, we’ve been half-heartedly reenacting the famous warlock-mage rivalry, mostly with him taunting me over his high ilevel and amazing loot luck, and me teleporting away without offering him a portal. Because he can go make out with a Beholder.

I’m also (and this is slightly embarrassing to admit) super excited about getting some transmog gear for my mage. It’s pretty much digital dress-up, but regardless, I can’t wait to rip holes in space and time while looking like a Kirin Tor Archmage.

Is that weird? I don’t care if so. It’s too much fun to care.

I’m also so, so thankful that Blizzard made all the changes that they did between the launch of Mists and patch 5.3 to make alting easier. I was able to cap valor first on Rhidach and then Eronac with little-to-no fuss. Having the Barrens weekly to score a free epic once a week is wonderful as well. And the reputations are hardly a burden, considering I was 4000 away from exalted with Klaxxi when I dinged 90. (August Celestials is another matter, but not everything can be a gimme, I suppose.)

I’m sure I’d be singing a much different tune if I got the mage to 90 two months ago, but whatever.

It’s only been a full day since 5.3 dropped, but wow, what a great patch. I have never felt so unpressured by the valor points grind, thanks to heroic scenarios. Like 15 minutes for 120-150 VP once per day, which is amazing. Despite an urgent need to cap every week (at least, until my gear is full upgraded) I have no concerns about how long it’ll take me to get that done.

The scenarios themselves are pretty bite-sized content, but I appreciate the step up in difficulty that the heroic flavor offers. Hopefully them not being a complete steamroll just yet will keep them interesting and not at all tedious. You also cannot beat that return on (time) investment.

In the three that I’ve run so far, all of them have included someone being a tank, which seemed to be a huge help. A healer was definitely not mandatory, but having one person taking and mitigating the damage from some damaging trash pulls was well worth it. The bonus timers also seemed pretty easy to hit (granted, that was in Throne gear).

I didn’t do much in the Battlefield: Barrens world event, but I liked what I saw.

I’m also a little annoyed (okay, jealous) because the Horde storyline right now is so good and the Alliance angle on it just cannot compare, no matter how awesome and allied and cooperative we are and how we’re planning out some sort of sneak attack with the Trolls as cover. That’s all well and good, but it’s so boring compared to a rebellion. Strife is sexy and exciting; reconnaissance is dreadfully meh.

Still, it was really nice to be back in the Barrens. I have good memories of that zone, especially after I learned how to exit general chat.

The whole event should be a nice diversion now that I’m pretty burnt out from caring about the Isle of Thunder. So, excellent pacing on the content additions there, Blizz.

Zoom, zoom

In my post the other day I talked about how critical it was for us to keep up our speedy pace and get all the farm down in one night, so we are poised for only progression on our second night. Well, thankfully, I did not jinx us! We had an awesome pace last night and stormed right through the first half of Throne of Thunder in two hours, chain pulling our way to Jin-Kun’s fresh corpse only a few minutes before raid officially ended.

Durumu won’t know what hit him on Monday!

I also picked up some great loot last night, among them an expertise-itemized Bracers of Constant Implosion, Zerat, and Ji-Kun’s Rising Winds (thanks to Voss). The tank upgrades just by themselves freed up enough expertise that I was able to push to 26% haste. It’s not an amazing amount, but I’m really happy that I’m finally starting to stack up that wonderful stat. If I could get a Worldbreaker’s Stormscythe to drop, I think I could do some serious damage.