Another achievement down, and my current favorite title in the game obtained. The DPS was so high that Sarth was dead before Shadron even came down.

Yes, it’s true. I don’t know how I haven’t found this gem of a blog till today, but it made me giggle with every post.

Go visit Tamarind and Chastity over at Righteous Orbs.

Our little 10-man got Mimiron down tonight, and I’m super excited about it. I’ve noticed a distinct lack of 10-man guides about it, so here is exactly how we did it and how we evolved towards killing him (I do hope you read the last post for last week’s tries though), with very few ranged to boot!

Group setup was:

Prot warrior, cat druid, retribution paladin, blood DK, arms warrior, mutilate rogue, destruction warlock (yes, just a single ranged DPS. It can be done, melee heavy groups, do not despair), resto druid, holy priest, resto shaman.

Phase 1:

Guardian Spirit the first Plasma Blast, Shield Wall the second, glyphed GS the third if it happens. GS glyph is a real godsend during this phase. We stopped Heroism-ing in P1 during tonight’s tries, but we never got a third anyway. MT always tries to drag him back to the middle after it Shock Blasts to spare the melee dodging various rings of mines. DPS pops cooldowns anyway, they will be back up for when it matters.

Phase 2:

A feral druid’s nightmare. No matter how hard you try, you can never be behind him. Popping short cooldown survival abilities is nice (I Barkskin every cooldown), but healers will have plenty of time to regen during Phase 3, so have no fear. Our paladin popped FR aura to ease the Heat Wave damage.

Rapid Burst will not track a moving target, so melee can keep moving out of the cone. Keep your ranged properly spread and more than one will never eat it. We call out every Rocket Strike we spot – they are hard to see for melee, so keep your eyes firmly planted on the ground. Our ranged though seemed to have no problem whatsoever with them. We also call out Spinning Up with a short note, as in “melee safe, healers move” “healers safe, melee run behind” etc.

Phase 3:

The best way we found of doing it, that made it a complete joke with lots of regen time for healers was this. Prot warrior sticks Vigilance on the feral (or someone else who will get hit frequently. You just want the prot warrior’s taunt to be off cooldown as much as possible). The feral, in this case me, will tank Assault Bots in cat gear and spec. The prot warrior will camp out underneath the ACU, soak every bomb, and tank every Junk Bot. This is where Vigilance on the feral or the warlock tank comes in handy, as Junk Bots can get out of control.

This limits incoming damage to very manageable amounts. Any class who is capable of tanking can withstand hits from Assault Bots, our DK in Frost Presence probably would have done the job fine. The bombs hit our prot warrior for about 15k, certainly much easier than letting them go off on a clothie and get them one-shotted. Note that Assault Bots can be stunned, which cuts off even more damage.

When the ACU comes down (our arms warrior was the core looter) all DPS immediately switch to him. All the adds get dragged to him and get cleaved alongside. Make sure you leg it afterwards though, so that you don’t catch the next Bomb Bot.

We had ACU down in about three to four Assault Bot kills, and we never had more than one Assault Bot up at a time. All our healers ended the phase at full mana.

Phase 4:

This is where it will all go to hell in a handbasket, very very fast. Your most immediate problem will be the chance of the first Shock Blast and P3Wx2 Laser Barrage overlapping. The tank needs to sit there and take the Shock Blast to prevent the unit from running amok. Just GS it out if it happens.

Your second most immediate problem is closely related to the first. And it is the one that caused us about 10 wipes before we figured out a solution. Here is your data:

1. The hitbox of the Leviathan is much smaller than the hitbox of VX-001.
2. In fact, the hitbox of the Leviathan is really damn small.
3. Laser Barrage is a conal attack whose starting point is the very center of the hitbox of VX-001.
4. When the Leviathan turns, all units will turn alongside it, unless the VX-001 is casting Spinning Up/Laser Barrage.

What happened to our tank was that he would attempt to turn if the route of the Barrage included his spot. However, this is much, much harder than it looks due to point 2. Because the hitbox of Leviathan is very small, no matter what the tank does, there is a very high chance of him turning around and/or running amok to chase the tank. This results in the Barrage being likely to mess people up (remember, if he moves from the center, the cone that the Barrage affects can get bigger).

So then, we tried not turning him until the Barrage actually started if it was possible to do so. However, if the tank turns very little, there is still the very high chance of being gibbed, due to points 1 and 3. Even though the tank is technically not on the same side as the Barrage, the smallness of the Leviathan’s hitbox and his proneness to move can drag him over the tank, to the point that the tank is just inside of the tip of the Barrage cone (but still on the correct side of the Leviathan), leading to a swift wipe.

Here is how we solved it.

For melee, ranged and healers, nothing changes. The Leviathan faced the entrance of the room to start with. We all stood stacked up behind him, and DPSed/healed as usual.

When the Barrage comes, if the tank needs to move, he needs to backpedal out of the way slowly, yes, using the S key backpedal, preferably towards a wall, very slowly turning the Leviathan if need be. This is the one fight where backpedaling will save your MT’s hide. As melee and healers are starting from right across the tank, this negates the risk that the cone will get larger and envelop the people on the edges. In fact, the cone on the tank’s side will get smaller as your tank will be backpedaling towards a wall. (I really do need to make a diagram of this)

The try we put this strategy to use was our kill try. Our MT still bit it during the second Spinning Up, but I took over in bear form, and it was a kill from there.

Other than that, we still announced every Rocket Strike, Shock Blast, and other relevant stuff such as “oh shit the warlock tank is dead BECAUSE SHE BACKPEDALED OUT OF A ROCKET STRIKE”. The head died first, followed by the middle and the bottom.

Pro tip: Ret paladins can reach the head with Judgment and Exorcism. DKs can Pestilence diseases onto it. Our gnome rogue was actually able to hit the head if he jumped, I personally failed at it.

And this, folks, is how we overcame the challenge that was Mimiron.

We attempted Hodir with frost resistance the first time today – 7 out of 10 raiders had over 300 FR, and we have all agreed that it makes the fight a lot easier. Icicles are no longer as penalising, so melee no longer has to move that much. Our tank was laughing at Frozen Blows – he resisted 50% off each hit. Not sure if it was a fluke, but we even ended up beating the hard mode + got the achievement for saving all the NPCs.

Tonight we’ll clean up Freya (here’s hoping your helm drops, Rageudder) and start putting in tries on Thorim and beyond. We probably won’t need more than 3 to 5 tries on Thorim, so I’m hoping we can beat Mimiron and put in some serious tries on Vezax. And dare I say Yogg? Vezax does not look like it will take long for our setup, as like I mentioned, we have pretty few mana dependent classes (pretty much only our healers), and our melee is great at interrupting.

And I finally got my Twilight Zone achievement last night, in a 10man zerg PuG (Grim Batol, I love you). We had pretty strong DPS – Sarth was consistently at 10% when he started yelling for Shadron to come down. But we had to sort out positioning requirements/not dying to void zones/not failing at fire walls, which took about five tries. Of the Nightfall was the one title I’d wanted since I heard about it, so I’m absolutely delighted.

I am pretty happy with the progress our little raid is making. We seem to have a steady lineup right now, and despite being _extremely_ melee heavy (Our DPSers are a warlock, a blood DK, an arms warrior, a ret paladin, and a rogue), we seem to be doing rather well.

Oneshot Flame Leviathan (but who doesn’t), Razorscale, Ignis, Deconstructor, and Iron Council. Kologarn took 3 tries, due to an unlucky disconnect and me being stupid with my AoE taunt.

Note to add tanks on Kologarn, do NOT AOE taunt them. Kologarn doesn’t care if he still has a valid melee target in range a la Ragnaros, but he does very much care if his primary aggro target is out of melee range.

Also note: You can do 10man Deconstructor with a single ranged, despite what people say. We lost our paladin to an unlucky bomb, but that was pretty much it.

The last patch has definitely made things so much easier, though. It makes me proud having beat those encounters on the first and second weeks. Tympanic Tantrum hits for pretty much nothing now compared to its old version. It’s also a lot easier to melt adds on Ignis – he used to be our bane and getting him down last week felt very good, but this week? We sped through him like he was nothing.

So, the new bosses. All I can say is that Auriaya, Freya and Hodir are very. Easy. They do require your tanks and healers to be moderately geared, especially Hodir (and we have both tanks in 4/5 Valorous and KT/Naxx25 weapons). But other than that, they come down to execution.

Auriaya’s hardest part is the pull, get the pull right and you’re set. It took us about 5 tries to get it right. The goal of the pull is not having both of her two adds pounce the same person. Even if that person is a tank, he will die unless he starts with defensive cooldowns popped.

This was our initial tries, but our tank died anyway before he even had a chance to pop Shield Wall. We tried pulling with totems and have them pounce the totems, but we were slow to react and it resulted in dead resto shaman. So we cheesed it and used our ret paladin to bubble pull to the tanks, from then on it went very smoothly and Auriaya died in short order. We only killed the defender two times, the third time it died to the cleaves anyway, just yell at your raid to move the hell out when the defender is about to die, and you’re set.

Hodir is a fight that requires your healers and tank to be geared. The end, really. You’ll probably fail with badly geared healers, unless they are incredible, and you’ll definitely fail with a badly geared tank. You don’t need extra Frost resistance. We did it with just the paladin aura. Lesser geared raids though might want to craft some FR items for their tank to survive Frozen Blows.

Our first three tries were spent learning how to recognize where to stand during Flash Freeze. There are a LOT of blue things on the ground during that fight, and they all look like each other. You are meant to look for the large blue runes. Not the tiny ones that appear when he is NOT casting Flash Freeze and meleeing normally instead, and signal an icicle falling on your head.

Once you find this extremely large blue rune, stand right outside it, and wait. You will see something drop inside it from the ceiling and the rune will turn white and solidify. Now is go time, so run in immediately. Flash Freeze should hit in the next 1-2 seconds. Do NOT go in before you see the icicle fall, as it will knock you back to someplace where you probably won’t have time to run back in before the freeze hits.

Note that you must have Projected Textures turned on in your video settings to see all this. It sucks for those with worse-off rigs, but yeah.

Frozen Blows will hit your tank and raid very. Hard. Rotate through tank and raid cooldowns, and do whatever it takes. Our next few tries after we learned Flash Freeze were spent learning how to deal with Frozen Blows. What finally worked for us was to have one dedicated healer doing nothing but spamming heals on the tank (resto shaman) and the other two topping off the raid (disc priest, resto druid). In retrospect, we would probably have been much better off with the disc priest on the tank and resto shaman and druid on the raid, but eh, it worked, no one died.

Flash Freeze and Frozen Blows are the only two tricks in this fight, nothing else to it, really. Get the gear and figure those out, then you’re good to go.

Also note that the aura Hodir casts on everyone is not like Keristrasza’s aura – on Keri, any movement will remove all of your stacks but on Hodir one movement only removes a single stack. However, Hodir’s aura isn’t applied anywhere near as frequently as Keri’s aura.

As for Freya, she has a lot. Of. Trash. Nothing she has is particularly hard except the Elders themselves, just pretty time consuming. The specials of the Elders do hit quite hard and are pretty likely to kill your tank without heavy healing. At least one Elder (the first one) is resettable, I’d assume the others are too.

Freya herself is much like Gothik. I’d say she is also about as easy as Gothik. Her healing aura and Attuned to Nature stacks prevent killing her before all 6 waves of her adds are dead. You will get 3 waves of different adds, and the same ones in the same order again, and then finally Freya. Oh, and also one random tree that pops up during the fight and heals Freya and Co. if not nuked immediately.

We wiped on her once because our melee cleavers missed the memo about “KILL THEM ALL AT THE SAME TIME D:” on the triple-add wave, we went back and did her again with success. There’s nothing else notable I can say about this fight. Once the adds are dead, you’d have a hard time wiping – her berserk timer is incredibly generous and she has only 1.4 million HP.

I’m guessing it will take us another two, maybe three weeks to clear Ulduar normally, given that exam and job schedules of our raiders permit. Not bad for a ragtag bunch that aren’t even in the same guild.

Purchased Lumi’s dual spec. Specced cat. Got glyphs. Trudged off to a target dummy to try it out.

Now, her gear is nothing special, and she’s not gemmed optimally. In the exact same gear before 3.1, and a cat spec, she used to average 2k dps on a target dummy.

In the same gear right now on live, she’s doing between 3 and 3.1k sustained. Self-buffed.

Needless to say, happy druid? Is happy.

I’m not at all pleased about Savage Defense, though. I feel a lot more squishy, having lost 4k armor and 3k HP overnight, and I really don’t think Savage Defense is making up for that. Maybe less of a nerf to HotW and SotF, or a better idea to have a damage shield was in order?

…Aggro on Priest, for we are that good, baby.

The warrior was in full S3, probably boosting the priest into weapon range or something. The priest was pretty failgeared, 250-ish resilience, sorta what you’d expect from a new 70.

And fail they did in spectacular fashion – if the warrior had gotten to Andersson he’d probably just own him in seconds, trouble was, he couldn’t. I popped stealth, racked up Cyclone DRs on the warrior, then racked up root DRs, then got bored and racked up Cyclone DRs again, meanwhile, he basically didn’t touch me at all. I was expecting at least an Intercept/Pummel in caster all the time and I was scared because I thought if he got on me, game over, don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200. But he just kept chasing, or trying to chase, Andersson in remarkable single-mindedness. And got a dead priest for his trouble, heh.

I think he was bad. Or arrogant. At any rate, we really enjoyed the 24 rating. Moral of the tale, don’t be bad, thanks, love, Andersson and Starlet.

EDIT: So I just learned that:

Two friends have logged on to my account.

Proceeded to invite themselves in my paladin’s 2v2.

And nuke the rating we built up from the 1300s with blood, sweat, and tears playing pretty much the most frustrating warrior/healer combo I ever ran across.

And they don’t see what’s so wrong with this, because “You weren’t playing your paladin anyway”.

I AM NOT FUCKING AMUSED AT FUCKING ALL. MAKE YOUR OWN TEAMS, KTHXBYE. Seriously wtf, who logs on to someone else’s account to actually STEAL THEIR ARENA TEAM? It’s not like 80g is a lot of money.

I swear, miserable fail doesn’t even begin to cover this one.

And definitely in style, baby.

I thought I’d try Starlet a little for this week’s arenas, seeing that now she’s past that 10k HP/350 resilience marks. Did some skirmishes with Severian’s rogue, and felt fairly useless constantly going up against full S3 characters – then Zilli came online, and we thought hey, let’s try some warrior – druid/rogue – druid games.

So. We made a new team. Was going to call it Starlet’s Stealth Sucks (because it does) but the name was taken, wtf? We ended up calling it Aggro on Priest, which basically…. goes back. Goes way back. I should probably stop here and explain this.

See, when I was leveling Elysiane, I pugged. A lot. Healers were damn popular back then, since they weren’t overpopulated (now that they are so good in PvP, everyone and their fish plays one, /sigh). So what happened was that I ended up in a lot of terrible, terrible PuGs. This caused the need for a macro, basically, one that said “/y AGGRO ON PRIEST!”. Everytime I got aggro in a group, which happened a lot with bad tanks, I would spam that and hope someone would help me.

But then, Elysiane grew up. Geared up. Applied for one of the best guilds on the server, and miracle of miracles, got accepted. And she forgot about this macro completely.

Alas, one fateful day would remind me of that macro.

Back then, I had a tendency to keep all my macros next to each other. That meant that this particular macro was jammed in with a lot of others I used frequently. Namely my shield self macro.

So one day, back when I was new in the guild, my guildies set up an AB premade. I’m sure everyone can see where this is going.

Much laughter ensued on Vent when all 14 of my teammates saw AGGRO ON PRIEST! repeatedly plastered across their screens, while I was trying to defend blacksmith under heavy attack and thinking I was spamming my Shield Self macro.

/facepalm

I earned the guild note “Aggro on priest” that day.

Anyway, back to the subject.

We played Zilli and Starlet at first, didn’t do too badly (think we about went even, which is good when the druid is as gimp geared as I am) but I felt I was very limited by gear and that the setup itself, warrior/druid, overall lacked “oh $%&! I need help, NOW” buttons. I really loved the ease of HoTing up my partner and going off to drink or focusing on CC chains, but it just felt like something was missing…

…and that something clicked when Zilli swapped to Andersson, his rogue.

The difference was vast. I suddenly felt I had a lot more escape options, a lot more panic buttons, and that we were more in control of the match in general. On-demand stuns, being able to get out of hairy situations with Cloak/Evasion/Shadowstep + a well-timed Swiftmend or NS/HT, the fact that two stealthies _can_ get better openers in and can get a better positioning where the other team is weak (when one of the stealthies is me, that is kinda shaky, but oh, well), and the fact that Zilli is just overall much better at being a rogue than a warrior due to sheer experience, thus making up for what I lacked in gear, made the setup click perfectly.

And if all else fails, we have Cheat Death. *shrug*

We shot up 100 rating from warrior/druid immediately, clocking over 1600 at the end of the night (I think our top rating was 1630 at one point), which isn’t bad for a setup we’ve never played. I’m terribly, embarrassingly inexperienced as a druid and some matches it really shows. I frequently forgot Nature’s Grasp, forgot Barkskin, forgot to Faerie Fire rogues, got popped out of stealth with great consistency, got caught in humanoid for 5 CP Kidney Shots, etc, etc.

Zilli’s massive experience and talent as a rogue pretty much saved the night, I’ve lost count of how many seemingly impossible 1v1 and even 1v2 matchups he won after I bit the dust. Hat off, I knew he was the reason we did so well in S2 as rogue/priest. /bow I think that’s one reason I enjoyed the setup so much, watching the display of sheer skill and thinking “There is no way we could have pulled that off as warrior/druid”, because on his rogue, he is THAT good.

Other than the stuff I consistently fail at, I don’t seem to have great trouble with getting away (unless two rogues are sitting on me in bear, then it’s GG unless Zilli hurries to take one down fast) or keeping people alive. Swiftmend is a really great emergency heal, but HoTs are usually more than enough to keep both of us going as long as I can consistently keep them up. I thought of going Dreamstate at one point, since it is rumored to work better with rogues, but my +healing is really gimp for that and I think I’d really miss Swiftmend anyway.

I manage to get lots of drink breaks especially vs warlock teams – we’ve got killing warlock pets down to an art, sapping pet owner, chain Cycloning the healer and bursting down the pet fast. They’re usually in panic mode by then, using up cooldowns, and we can delay the summoning of a second one by a good 30 seconds if we’ve distracted them properly, thus letting me drink up to full (scare them more and sometimes they end up forgetting to sic the pet on someone, free points thanks).

Speaking of warlocks, warlock teams are usually our easiest matchup anyway, no matter whether double DPS or lock/healer. I think we lost maybe two lock/healer matchups out of a good fifty matches played – we like killing the pet and immediately sitting on the healer while I go off, drink, rack up Cyclone DRs on the warlock and roots on the healer, /laugh at SL/SL dps, stack up HoTs and go drink some more… you get the idea. Rogue/druid against a warlock/healer setup of any kind is so forgiving of mistakes that we’ve had matches where both of us were repeatedly at 10% with all cooldowns blown and we still managed to win. Zilli’s able to catch up to and kill druids with great consistency as well, which makes the ever-common lock/druid setup even more of a free point fest. Double DPS I try to make myself scarce immediately and start up a Cyclone/Root rotation on the other DPS while Zilli has his fun with the warlock, it usually is over quickly provided I manage to get away.

Hardest matchups – I’d say mage/rogue is pretty much the anti setup, we’ve won very few of the mage/rogue setups we met so far. The amount of burst on me is silly, and we’ve tried everything. If I start in cat, more often than not the opposing rogue finds me while Zilli’s working on the mage, and being found in cat is… bad. It just really is. If I just start in bear, that’s like screaming KILL ME NAO and gives them the opportunity to open however they like. Cyclones and roots just eat a Counterspell, and with the amount of burst they have available, a 8-second lockout pretty much spells instant death in and of itself, no pun intended.

I guess I just need more gear to have more of a chance of surviving the initial burst. If that happens, we’re looking at a much better chance of winning because I can heal to full and we can reset the match, whereas they now have all their cooldowns blown and are in defensive mode.

I find rogue/rogue another hard matchup, as with mage/rogue, capability to keep me locked down by too long a time ruins it. I pretty much need to sit through two CS/KS durations in bear and when I try to get away, wham 2x Shadowstep.

Zilli says he also doesn’t like anything with a shaman or a hunter in it, simply because with hunters positioning is so important and shamans are very hard to kill. Running shamans OOM is damn near impossible if they are under attack, most shamans have an itchy Purge finger, they wear mail, can ground/shock Cyclones etc. Although with hunters, it could be that most hunters we met tonight were in double DPS setups where it was harder to control them, seeing almost all of them were BM. In single DPS situations it probably is not that challenging (unless it’s hunter/druid, hello thirty minute matches).

I thought at first that warrior/paladin setups would be terrible for us, but we won most warrior/paladin setups we met. There was one particular very well geared team in which the paladin had his shoulders, all match they did nothing but sat on Andersson in Lordaeron (who happened to crank out some sick sick DPS on the warrior). Hot him up, Cyclone Cyclone Cyclone, swap Cyclone to warrior upon bubble, /lol, /bye. There was maybe a single warrior paladin setup who Justiced me and chased me around, and oh well, I’ll take the one loss if the rest of them are as stupid as they were tonight.

Mirrors. Mirrors were fun, we ended up winning almost all our mirrors because let’s face it, my rogue > other rogues. I’d get opened on, hang in there a bit, and either the other druid would die, or we’d die about at the same time and it’d be a 1v1 with our rogues. Nerve wrecking, but like I said, my rogue > other rogues, and he won pretty much all but one or two 1v1s (the losses were ones where he was at a bad disadvantage, low health, no cooldowns etc).

All in all I’m delighted with the setup so far. After playing for ages with the frustration that is warrior/paladin, turtling constantly, having to play extremely defensive, and sometimes just downright feeling inadequate as a healer, rogue/druid is amazingly refreshing. I love my newfound offensive power. I love being able to focus on things other than healing as a whole. I love being “adequate” even if my gear can’t deliver it. Looking forward to more games with the combo, and hopefully a higher rating – I’m going for 2set S1 as soon as possible, with that I should be hitting 400 resilience easy.

I reluctantly logged on yesterday – and found that I was bored with the game and didn’t really have my heart in it after the whole raid drama. Just then, Zilli came online, and I told him about how I sort of felt tired of the game. He said to just wait, he’d find us something to do.

Ten minutes later, he popped up with “How about going to Ironforge?”

Now, I love trips to Ironforge. There’s this thing about being at the heart of an enemy city and preying on unsuspecting flagged Alliance… who think they’re safe in their own Auction House. Anyway, I said something to the tune of “OMGWTFBBQ LET’S GO NAO” and off we went, he on Andersson, his rogue, and me on Starlet. Down to Gromgol, into Westfall following the coast, to Elwynn Forest from there, and into Stormwind.

In SW we messed around for a little, killing a couple of flagged lowbies, and I almost got unstealthed by a level 66 night elf again…. /facepalm I got away, though, and we got on the tram to IF, which is where the fun started.

As soon as we ported into the king’s room I ran through one of those little braziers and got unstealthed again which caused a little commotion (I swear, someday I will learn to play), but we ran back to the tram, dusted our feathers, and moved on. We started sneaking through to the AH, looking for flagged, lone people to gank, got a couple: A rogue, a few hunters, a resto shaman.

We got ganked a couple of times ourselves too – it’s easy to turn the tide of the battle in your favor when you can enlist the help of an entire city as soon as you get low on health, but I digress.

Eventually, I ran back from one death to find Zilli in one of those lava trenches, sitting around a campfire with a female Night Elf rogue from one of the big name Alliance guilds on the server, for a little impromptu RP. I unstealthed and joined the party. However, those who noticed us didn’t intend to leave us alone, and we kept repeatedly getting shot at/fireballed from above the trenches. Our helpful rogue friend enlisted the help of a priest from his guild to MC-save us, but even that didn’t help a lot.

Suddenly, Zilli said “I wish my other account was active so I could talk to that rogue” (we both have double accounts, one for the Alliance side and another for the Hordie side of our server, being that we play on a PvP realm). As luck would have it, I had just reactivated mine that day, and I said he could use mine to speak to her if he wanted.

So he got on my little Night Elf druid to speak to her, and apparently, she expressed a desire to go to Orgrimmar with us. Being such hospitable Hordies, we said we’d certainly accommodate her, and out we rode together.

Outside, the rogue had one of the most famous warriors on the server waiting – a Night Elf in full S3/T6, MT of the top Alliance guild on the server and notorious PvPer in her off-time. She had also brought a guildie priest. We started emoting back and forth, and the three of them dueled Zilli and each other for a little. Then they mounted up for their journey to Orgrimmar, and Zilli and I hearthed back to Shattrath to start up our welcoming committee.

I logged on my priest to provide MC-heal help if needed, we recruited our GM into the group, and started camping out in Durotar waiting for them to arrive. Soon after, there they were: The warrior and priest from earlier, and another paladin and rogue from their guild.

They attracted a lot of Horde attention – those who wanted to kill them, those who wanted to duel them, those who just wanted to have a little RP fun. We’d make them aware of any impending danger via Zilli and they’d just gang up on anyone who planned to kill them, but never touched anyone else even though lots of us were flagged. They obliged to most duel requests, had emote fights, campfires were made immediately, and there was generally lots of fun to be had.

I must admit, the lowbie panic in general chat “OMG TEH ALLYZ ARE IN OUR CITY HALP” made it much more fun. And being able to ask them to kill any Horde that was being annoying – just that much better.

Eventually they had enough, and had to go – and it was us, a warlock we knew from their guild who also has a Horde account, and our GM again, around a campfire. We were having a chat and enjoying the quiet time after all the commotion, when Zilli said to come along, he’d take me somewhere.

I mounted up, curious, bid farewell to Rutjake the priest and Rageudder the warrior, our GM, and followed Zilli. We rode through Durotar, to Barrens, into Ratchet following the coast… my curiosity kept growing, and he refused to tell me where we were going. We finally entered Dustwallow and got on the road to Theramore, and by the time we were at the gates of Theramore I still hadn’t figured out where he was taking me. We hung a left, he one-shotted a random Alliance passing by (slash sigh), and ran into the water – that was when I took a look at the map and realised where he was taking me.

“That island ahead of us, that where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
“But what is there… oh wait, is that Alcaz Island?”
“Yes!”

I had heard of the island before but had never been there – it was one of those places that I’d always planned to make a trip to someday, but somehow never got around to. (It astounds me that after over 2 years of playing the game, there still are places on the map I haven’t been to.)

Anyway, we reached the island, with me excitedly riding around everywhere. “Oooh, what’s there up on that hill? In that building? Look at the sunset, it looks gorgeous from here! Ouch, I AGGROED HALP” Zilli took me inside one of the buildings and “introduced” me to Dr. Weavil (if you’ve never been there to see him, you’re definitely in for a surprise), came with me down into the dungeon for a little exploring, and went up on the hillside to check out what the view was like from up there. We finally settled down on the wooden dock to watch the sunset and RP a little, enjoyed the ending of the day and resting after the whole excitement and chatted away.

Going back to the title, I think this is precisely why I play this game. Not the big-name PvE encounters, not the battleground PvP, not for glory and phat epax in arena.

I play this game for the bunch of people who know that the game is not all about one of the above. For those who think that sitting around a campfire in Shattrath, making friends from the opposite faction, and trips to undiscovered corners of the map is still fun. For those people who still manage to think outside the box and realise the game is one big grind only if you choose to make it so.

If you’re one of the above, thank you. Everyone who made yesterday this much fun, thank you. Thanks for reminding me there are things to the game other than mindless repetitive grinds. You’re the reason I keep playing.

Much love,
Elysiane.

…of the fact that Elysiane now has 1089 shadow damage in her shadow gear.

Really not too shabby for a priest who spends most of her time as holy/disc, is it?

I might get her that blue PvP set just to try out shadow – already have enough honor to buy the nonset epic boots, and I have the bracers already, so I could scrounge up 300 resilience in PvP gear easily. Thing is I just spent 400g on gemming and enchanting said shadow gear so do I want to spend another 50 on a respec that might only last a few days, and buy the blue set + gem it, that’s another thing already. I could do dailies (failies!) and get my gold up, but I’m way too busy grinding honor on Kaliah and leveling Starlet my little cow to bother with all the failies every day.

I want to get Spellstrike Pants crafted for her, she’s wearing the epic drop from SL heroic at the moment with 7 spelldamage gems. And hopefully get Fel-tinged Mantle from heroic MST to drop (all I’ve seen from Vexallus so far is that damn dagger over and over again when Elysiane goes, and the staff, of course, when Rochalie goes, it’s like a joke, Roch has been coveting the breastplate and Ely the mantle for ages). That should put me over 1100 easy.

Hm, I wish we didn’t need a paladin tank for ZA so I could bring Ely as shadow every once in a while – I feel way too responsible for the success of our raids though, I would feel guilty if I didn’t put my best effort into it.