What I've been up to

I'm going to put a break in this post because yesterday I got invited to the WoW Beta and I'll save my little bit of discussion about it for after the break.

So I'm still raiding with Spoiled Milk. There's been no new boss kills. We've been having small issues with our kills, but those mistakes mean wipes, which means more time killing bosses. Immerseus is probably the worst one. It's the boss we've been killing the longest and yet... each week we seem to have some issues with the fight. Last week was particularly rough with and we eventually gave up on Galakras because we were having issues with people in the towers being teleported back to the ground. After some research we learned that this was happening because of getting aggro with the mobs on the ground. So this week we did eventually get Galakras but we were still having so many other issues. And we didn't finish the raid on Friday. I think I'm going to have to search open raid for a group that could use a hunter. I really want as many chances to get more heirlooms as I can get.

I've also been working on the cape quest on my shaman. I've really been able to take advantage of the two buffs. She was working on the valor part of the quest when there was the valor buff and now I've been enjoying the rainful of extra runestones and secrets.

My level 70 twink druid is getting some better gear but I really need to give her some love. She doesn't have any professions and her gear is unenchanted and ungemmed. And I can't look at her bracers. They really need to be replaced. The guild she's in has strict rules about what I can and can't do and what I can use and can't use. Sometimes the rules seem silly but the guild leader has his reasons.

I've also done some pet battling. One of my guildies in Spoiled Milk is obsessed with pet battling. He's still fairly new to the game so he doesn't have an incredibly large collection yet, but he's getting there. He's also really good at leveling pets and has even leveled a few for me. I felt that since I now have these level 25 pets I should try to pet level and battle the trainers. I finally managed to beat all the tamers in Pandaria and my friend has even given me advice on how to use the battle against Aki to help powerlevel some pets. I know that there's methods for all the other trainers but I'm still working on figuring out how to do so. My friend is working on the Celestial Tournament. Occasionally he wants to use a pet that he doesn't have so he's been borrowing some of my pets. It works well for me because when I get them back they've been leveled.

Herald of the Titans!

I've managed to get my paladin to have two decent sets of gear for Heralds runs and have been signing up for runs on OpenRaid. Today I was only a reserve but I dutifully logged on and I received a new friend invite and asked if I could possibly tank. Yay! I had been running around practicing healing so I had to make sure my tanking gear was up to snuff and that I had my flasks. Then it was off to Ulduar!

The first two attempts went alright but we were having mishaps with the cosmic punch. After the 2nd wipe I realized I didn't have righteous fury on. Whoops! 

Third attempt I was just standing next to the boss but he was mad at me and a few attacks later I was the main tank instead of the off tank. My dps also went sky-high. The other tank said that it wasn't completely my fault that I was the first tank, he saw that I had aggro and figured he'd let me have it. So considerate. But a few moments later and BAM!

I'm now a proud Herald of the Titans!

Iron Horses and Iron Bosses

It seems that Spoiled Milk's new raid times has been working better, either that or the summer has just given us a second wind. Whatever the reason, we've finally begun to start pushing heroic kills again. It still seems strange to have so many people as part of the raid who aren't guildies, but they are also consistent members of our group so it's been steady. And really, raiding is getting a group of like minded people together to attempt to kill things. And we've gotten some really cool people to come raid with us.

Anyway, one of our guildies saw the iron horse and absolutely had to have it. He put up a hitching post and the whole raid spent several minutes parading around on horseback, before being reminded that we should stop wasting time and start working on Iron Juggernaut.

We had one attempt on Iron Jug last week and we hoped with 3 healers we would be able to survive the second phase and be able to get a kill. Our first attempt went really well and we were close. And the next attempt was close as well. There's something very frustrating about close attempts. But we kept at it and soon we had our very first heroic Iron Juggernaut kill!

We went on to work on Dark Shamans and our closest attempt was to 4%. So very close. But it was getting close to 2 am so we had to admit defeat. We'll be going back on Friday night to finish the raid on normal. I think the finish up is interesting because last week there was only 3 from my guild and one had to leave before we killed Paragons. I'll be curious to see who will turn up on Friday and if I'll be tanking on Tyle or dpsing on Awoi. I'm hoping for dpsing because I'd like to practice using my Beastmaster spec. I felt awful about the raid this week because we didn't have a bloodlust. There were several members who had drums which worked fine and I did have a mastery buff on Tues and spell haste last night... but I feel like an awful hunter for not being able to switch. But my guildies were good about it. They didn't really expect me to switch because they know I don't know how to play bm and they claimed my dps was too good for me to switch to something unfamiliar. But I still think I should learn it, just in case.

Good Week Of Raiding

This was the first week of raiding with our new times. It still feels like half the group is full of pugs which is a little annoying but since most of them are ones that we've raided with before it was still a fun.

Tuesday night we started late because we had to track down a tank. After locating one we were finally able to get started. And we had a really terrible start. I have come to realize that Immerseus is a weird boss. We can either one shot him or spend hours trying to get him down. But after a few attempts we finally managed to pull things together, figure out the problems, and got Immerseus down.

Then we found ourselves facing Protectors. We have made attempts on Protectors but haven't had much success. Our biggest challenge has been handling He's desperate measures. It's been a challenge trying to remember who to throw to, who's already been thrown to, and who can't be thrown to. We've tried to put together a throwing list but we've still had trouble with it. This week one of our warlock's suggested we have the dps throw it in alphabetical order. We figured it wouldn't hurt and for some reason it worked really well. We had one attempt that was really close but the enrage killed us. We were determined that we would get this boss the next time. We got the tank to keep He closer to the other bosses so that we could have more cleave on He and things were going really well. Than we had one of our dps disconnect but we kept going. We were getting close but so was the enrage timer. Unfortunately we hit the enrage timer again but there was enough dots on the bosses so that they were killed with one dps left standing.  It was not a beautiful first kill but a kills a kill!

The rest of the night went well with one-shots on Naru and Sha. Since it was late we called it a night there.

Wednesday we continued with Galakras. While they had gotten heroic galakras last week it was still rough. We had to adjust who went up to the towers and had to do some work getting the waves of adds killed correctly. We finally managed to get a good attempt and called for galakras to be shot down when we realized no one was manning the gun in one of the towers. Oops. We couldn't get the mobs under control for another attempt at shooting down galakras so we had to try again. I volunteered to go to the tower since I could stay at the bottom and help with killing and than use the rope to get to the top when the waves have been thinned down. The attempt went well and we got Galakras down and the fight was so much easier after that. We had our two groups and we killed Galaras without any trouble.

We spent the rest of the night attempt heroic Juggernaut. We didn't get the kill but we feel pretty good about attempting it next week.

Last night we finished up the run on normal. Neither of our tanks could make it so I volunteered to switch to Tyledres and tank. I was really happy at the end of the night when we killed Garrosh because it meant I had the kill on Tyle

Things have been looking up

I know I've been trying to figure out what to do if worse came to worse and Spoiled Milk couldn't turn around their slump and get to raiding again. It's been a worry for all of the raid team but things have finally managed to turn around. We have been slowly filling in our ranks with regular pugs. I'm not certain how I feel about pugs. On one hand they have no obligation to our guild but on the other hand...

I'm not certain Spoiled Milk has ever been concerned with having full guild runs. It's more about a good group getting together, killing stuff, and having a good time. I came into the raid as... well...not really a pug but they were perfectly happy leaving me out of the guild but still having me be a regular member of the raiding group even if I was raiding on an alt. And there's been several other members that were pugs for some time before becoming guildies. One of our warlocks was part of another guild for months before someone finally asked if he wanted to be part of our guild.

But it's not just filling in holes in the raid that we've been attempting to fill. We've also attempted to make the guild a busier place and to try and recruit raiders from our server. The one downfall with that is most of us don't need anything from normal bosses but if a raider is looking for a guild for heroics there are so many more attractive options. But we've hashed out some ideas about things to try in the future. How well it'll work will be interesting to see.

But we'll have new raids times. I'm excited by that. They won't start at such a late hour for me and we have plans for raiding on three nights a week. But the news that has me most excited is that we're going to attempt progression every other week for a bit. We have new guildies who we would like to raid with but they aren't geared. So it's been a bit of a struggle to try and decided whether we should spend time gearing them or keep pushing with pugs for heroics. Maybe it's not possible to have the best of both worlds but we're going to give it a try.

But the news I'm most excited about is that there has finally been progression. The last week of school when I didn't raid because I was panicking about studying and getting things ready for finals, the group had it's first heroic sha kill. It's been a few weeks since then but two weeks ago I got my first heroic sha kill.

Last week we put some attempts on Protectors before calling it quits and killing them on normal but we were able to get heroic sha again without any trouble. Saturday night the internet on the farm disappeared so I couldn't raid. I was informed that they were able to kill heroic galakras. They also teased me about a heroic bow dropping but they were just joking. I'm starting to see a pattern though... they kill stuff when I'm not there XD.

Here's hoping that things stay strong.