The Mighty Thok Slain

Spoiled Milk gave Thok a try last week and we were hoping to get the kill this week on Saturday. We had cleared up to Thok on Thursday and Friday and started Saturday at Thok.

It took a lot of work. We switched up having three versus two healers. But finally went with two healers since the only dps that could switch to heals was also our best dps. Without our shaman's dps we just weren't getting enough damage done on Thok. We also switched up the order we opened the doors. We finally decided that the poison door was just overwhelming our healers so we left it for last and hoped we could do enough damage on Thok during the fire and frost doors to be able to finish him before he went on a rampage after the poison door. Our final door order was fire, frost, then poison. It was a pretty close kill but we got him in the end.

Last week our guild had considered mergering with another. After some debate it was finally decided that we would stay in our own guild. I'll admit that I'm relieved. I was nervous about how this merger would take place and how it would affect our raid group. I know we aren't pushing heroics right now and I'm not certain that it's something we will be doing in the next expansion. But that's still some time away and we've got to finish getting though SoO. We're getting closer.

Gastalon the Mage

Last night I really wanted to level but I didn't want to run dungeons. I was actually feeling like questing. It's a rare feeling and I'm sure it'll go away soon. But it left me with a bit of a problem. The toons I'm currently leveling have been sitting in their capital cities this whole time and haven't gone out into the world at all because I've just been running dungeons using dungeon finder. I knew if I tried to take them to an appropriate place to quest I'd get bored along the way and end up running dungeons again.

So I found myself staring at my character screen and wondering what to do. Then I had a brilliant idea. New toon! As I looked at the full screen I thought about switching to Firetree or another connected realm when I realized the toon at the bottom had never actually been started. Gastalon has been patiently waiting since Febuary for some love and a chance to wear the Gaston mog I came up with for Matty's Oscar party. It seemed like it was fine to go and level...a mage.

I've never managed to level a male toon so I'm feeling pretty excited. Gastalon isn't very certain that being a mage is manly. He thought that a warrior or hunter would be better. I'm still not sure how I won this argument. But he's definitely mad about wearing the dress. He can't wait to wear a shirt and pants.

Which means running around and blasting stuff in the face. He managed to reach level 13 last night. Gastalon didn't particularly care what spec he was. He didn't think any sound particularly macho so he left the choice up to me. I had a hard time choosing. I've leveled my last mage as frost and she raided Dragon Soul dungeon finder as fire and I was trying to decide if I wanted to try arcane or stick with something I was familiar with. Gastalon finally made the decision when he declared that he wasn't following in the holves of some draenei bimbo. He's words. Not mine. I decided that he might be right. About playing arcane that is. My Azilem is hardly a bimbo.

Now I just have to keep Vaunt from finding out that I'm spending time running around as a mage istead of throwing green fire and chaos bolts at stuff. It's never good to get on a warlock's bad side.

Lost of Raids and other things

Holy cow! It's been almost a whole month since I last wrote.

Things have been a bit crazy. I've had a few more tests and the doctors have finally decided that my pain comes from two sources. One is from acid reflux and the other is nerve/muscle/or something else. They weren't too certain about the second source other then it wasn't anything internal. I'm definitely starting to feel better. I'm currently planning to return to college in January. I'm really excited about it.

Currently I'm helping more around the farm. My dad was cleaning the office windows using the lift when he fell and landed in the holding area. He broke some ribs, the bone in the back of the shoulder, and one of the bones in his back. Things could have been a lot worse. My dad spent a night at the hospital but then he's been home. He had to wear some braces but he's now doing a lot better.

Alright, now for what I've been up to in WoW. Let me think. I've been raiding. And some more raiding. I think I did some raiding on this other night as well. XD

Are late night weekend raid team is currently working on Thok. It's definitely a good fight to be a hunter on but I'm feeling like my lack of gear is holding my raid team back. I try to remind myself that I'm not actually undergeared just not as geared as everyone else. Right now everyone is hoping I can get a weapon drop and maybe a trinket as well. But I have confidence that I'll get something this week. I finally got my legendary cloak on my hunter and things can only get more awesome from there.

My guild leader has also been trying to build a second raiding group. It doesn't raid quite as late at night and it mostly consists of alts and friends from other guilds. We've even got Arv to come dps a few times. Norushen is not very cooperative though. Of the times we've been though we've only killed him once. I'm hoping that as the weeks progress we'll get a more consistent group of raiders and start progressing though it better. But it's still been fun and it's awesome to get to raid with Arv again.

I've also moved several of my toons from Shadow Rising to Spoiled Milk. I was really tempted to leave my death knight in SR but I realized that I haven't been playing her because I know that I'll miss out on any pugs, flexs, or other things that SM is doing and that SR isn't. I do my the SR crew but I'm glad that the SM people enjoy having me hang out with them so much.

I feel like I've gotten a lot closer to them now that I'm "offically" SM. Which is kinda funny because they are currently talking about merging our guild with another one called insomnia. It's a late-night raiding guild and the hope is to be able to have the twenty people for the mythic raiding in the new expansion. I wonder why they think we'll be pushing that content when we aren't even doing heroics now? Insomina is which has me wondering why they would consider absorbing us. It's not set in stone right now and I'm definitely worried about it. I don't want to lose the people I'm currently with. We're hoping to get a flex group with some of the members from Insomina to see how well we mesh together. It'll be an interesting night.

The mind rambles

I've been in a funk. I just haven't felt much like writing things. I tend to be an very inward person. If I'm feeling that something isn't right I'll pull inwards and work things out in my mind.

One of the things that I've been trying to deny is the end of Shadow Rising's raiding. It's been coming. There just hasn't been that hunger and push to clear content. They got Lei Shen but there hasn't been much interest in SoO. I'm not saying there was no interest but just not interest from everyone. A few weeks ago it was made official. No more raiding. And I do feel awful about it. But I'm not sure there was really anything I could have done about it either.

I still have some good things going on. I really enjoy my other guild. And they've been making some good progress in SoO. But I feel that I'm not holding up my end there. I've recently made the switch from my warlock to my hunter. My much less geared than everyone else hunter. Awoi, who does so much less dps then the other dps. I'm certain my best contribution is my sporebat. And that there's not three warlocks in the raid. I have to remind myself that each week she's made some really good progress on getting better gear. I guess I'm just feeling some frustration. It would be nice to stop leveling and gearing new toons to replace raid ones. And I really love my death knight. I haven't felt much like playing her. What's the point of having her raid ready when she won't be raiding? I thought about asking to switch her into Spoiled Milk but I'm not sure that would be good for the raid. There's already a lot of melee. A shaman, rogue, and a  paladin. There's plenty there already.

The past weeks my focus has been on getting Awoi gear, progressing though the legendary questline, and getting any gear from the timeless isle. She's finally reached a point where any gear upgrades will have to come from either flex or higher difficulty. And I'm back to dying for a new weapon. Hers is from SoO lfr. It's decent but I'm craving something better for her. It's a good thing.

It seems weird to think that my main is now a hunter. I've never thought I would be a hunter. I need to do a lot of studying to figure out the best things to be doing. It definitely feels more comfortable then being a warlock. I love my little goblin but there's no hiding the fact that she's a caster. That and I'm now really spoiled about the moving and still dpsing thing.

I think I'd like to start working on Tyle again. She's been quietly shelling out red gems for my hunter but she deserves a chance to finish out the expansion. I think I'll see if I can get her though some flexs. I hope Drak is going to be on the list of connecting realms soon but I don't think I'll hold my breath waiting for that to happen. I do find it funny that two of the realms I have toons on are being connected. Aegwynn was my original server and I still have a server full of toons there and Dunemaul is where I have a few horde toons. I doubt that I'll see Korgath on that list. It's still a pretty bustling place. Definitely worth a quick look to see what a realm could be. And to know that if things fall through with Spoiled Milk I do have toons that could make a transition to a realm with more options. Although I don't see that happening anytime soon. There's some really hungry people looking to smash Garrosh in the face.

Halfway there!

This week's raiding with Spoiled Milk I was able to take my hunter for most of the bosses. Horray for sporebat! Go Awoi and Eoda!

We cruised though the first four bosses although I did switch to my warlock for the third boss. Since our kill last week was so close we wanted as much dps as possible to ensure a kill. Got it in one shot with everyone alive at the end. That's a huge improvement.

Last week we had gotten several attempts on Galakras and we were optimistic about our chances of getting a kill. Our first attempt was very close. We had less then 1% left before we wiped. There were a few minor mishaps that we felt cost us the kill such as one person went a bit sideways instead of straight back and the explosion killed a few people and a major raid cooldown got used too early. Just small stuff but we felt next time we would have the kill. Unfortunately we bungled the next few attempts and didn't get past the first phase. Eventually we were getting ready to call our last attempts because one of our tanks really needed to leave. And the attempt was good! It's amazing how well that last attempt works. We managed to pull Galakras down and everything went well.

We decided we had enough time for one attempt on Iron Juggernaut and raced off to try. It was a giant mess and a pretty good end for the night.

The next night we were prepared for Iron Juggernaut and I was surprised to find myself raiding on my hunter again. I expected that I would be asked to warlock again so I was pretty nervous. Iron Juggernaut was really easy. We got the kill on our 2nd attempt.

We then made our way to the Dark Shamans. They told me to stop dying so much. I really need to figure out how to keep my hunter alive. My turtle Soup has definitely spoiled me because I have no idea how to keep my hunter alive. I was asked to pull the bosses because I could feign death. Unfortunately I actually had a real death. Anyway, our first attempts on the boss was the two tank strategy but the closest we got was about 40%. One of our dps was clammering for a three tank strat and volunteering to be the third tank. We figured we'd give it a shot. If it worked, great, and if it didn't we wouldn't be out much and we'd get our dps to stop talking about it.

The three tank strat requires one tank on the female shaman and two tanks for the male one. The shamans are pulled apart far enough so that their abilities don't overlap. The raid is divided by melee and range. The range attack the female shaman and the ooze adds while the melee deal with the male shaman. The male group went to the corridor that leads to the next boss. I'm not completely sure how they dealt with stuff except that they stayed close together, moved out of the flame wall, and made sure to drop the poison stream close to the building. Since I was ranged I was far away from the melee. The tank with the female boss pulled her over to the gates that are the entrance to Orgrimmar and tried to stay as far away from the other tank as possible. As ranged I just had to avoid stuff and make sure to slow and kill the oozes.  When the bosses bloodlusted they were pulled together to make sure that we could get as much damage on them both as possible.

Our first attempt with the three tank strat brought the bosses down to 1%. It was very close. This was definitely what would work for us. After a couple more attempts we had another boss kill.

We had a few attempts on General Naz'grim. And while we got close we weren't able to get a kill. Hopefully next week we'll push though and get further along.

Closest Boss Kill Ever!

The past few weeks Spoiled Milk has been beating the first two bosses then banging our head on the third. This week we finally had a breakthrough and accomplished the closest boss kill I've ever seen. We managed to get him just as he enraged and took out everyone. We were really excited to finally have Norushen killed and to move on to the Sha of Pride

The Sha of Pride was easier. After several attempts we were able to eek out another boss kill. And then we decided it was time for a break. We put several good attempts into Galakras on Friday and Saturday night but we weren't able to defeat that dragon. We're hopefully next week will get us closer.

Still it was a pretty good week! 4 bosses killed which is double what we had last week!

On a side note I had a chat with my guild leader. Right now the raid currently has two warlocks in it which is fine, however, one of the regular dps is leaving and out guild leader was looking for new dps to recruit. One of the potential replacements is another warlock. He asked how'd I'd feel about getting my hunter geared up and ready to go and I'm pretty excited about no longer playing a caster. I just have to get my hunter some more gear. She's currently sitting at 514 so I'm hoping for some good lfr and flex runs.

Just Needed a Break

I've been awfully quite about WoW for a bit. I just haven't been feeling very enthused about it. Which surprised me. Here there's this new patch full of all kinds of new things and playing WoW has become an unexciting chore. Bleh.

So I decided last week after the raid not to play any more WoW for the week. I thought I might miss it. Nope. Nada. I was good.

Instead I decided to indulge in playing some old gamecube games. I had recently dug them out because my little sister was home from college and wanted to raid my stash so she could have some games and controllers for playing with her boyfriend who recently gotten a gamecube. My family gave her a hard time about how she has a wii that she's left at home but it was cool. She swiped a bunch of my really cool games like the classic sonic collection, all my mario parites (I mean seriously? Did she really need to take all 4 XD? Then again, why do I own 4?) and super smash brothers.

Since all these games were dragged out into the light of day once again I wound up staring at my collection of Zelda games and trying to remember how far I've gotten in them. Apparently the only one I've ever finished is the first one I've gotten which is Four Swords Adventure. Suddenly I had a dying need to complete some dungeons, collect rupees, and save Zelda! But... I had some toons that needed to be vp capped, leveling to be done, timeless island stuff to do... yeah...

So last week when I decided to not play WoW I went off to the world of Zelda. I decided to play four swords because I haven't played it since I beat it in 2006. Which is a really long time ago. I had an absolute blast! 4 days later and I've saved Zelda, beaten Ganon, and saved Hyrule! And I still find it funny that I was using Link to throw another link around. And then I had to choose just what game to play next. I dug out my gameboy and I'm playing Minish cap. I'm already further then before. Which really isn't saying much. I started Ocarina of Time on the gamecube but the graphics just don't compare to the 3ds version so I think I'll play either Majora's mask or windwaker instead and complete Ocarina on the 3ds.

But I'm also finally excited to be back in WoW. Sorta. I'm not going to be pushing myself so hard but I think it's feeling more bearable again. I'm even a bit excited about timeless island when I realized it was a lot like a Zelda overland zone. Lots of exploration, hidden content, puzzles, mobs everywhere, areas you can only unlock after you've advanced though the game a bit. I also realize I might be a bit demented.

But every now and then a break is a really nice thing to take. :)