Armaggedon's coming!

Friday 4th started like so many others of recent times.  The core of my group online, and scratching ourheads as what to do.  We knew that we were missing one of our regulars, thus we were down to 6 bodies.  Was it worth trying to scratch together 4 puggers?  Were we better off heading our separate ways?  Was the Friday night “fun run” going to be full of the usual dramas and criticisms, that have been hitting us week after pugging week?

Basically we are all a bit sick of Kara, in particular now that we only just form the core of a raid.  The 1st half of Kara is just gravy, the 2nd half is full of wipes of one sort or another. Nightbane is at best iffy, Prince wont go down for us, Illhoof.. well we never seem to find a Warlock to get us through, and our other strategies are really suck it and see, we don’t even bother with Netherspite… we just aren’t a coherent enough group to run it.

Our other option is ZA… If you were to base our chances on the success we have with the Bear boss, then we should steamroll the place… but that’s where it always ends.

Anyway, back to Friday.  We make the decision that if we can get a group together by 9pm, we will give Kara a go.. and low and behold we do.  Not only that but it is readily apparent that the shadow priest we have picked up for the run is awesome.

So once again, we are steamrolling though the 1st half.. even when my mouse goes AWOL during Romulo & Juliet, it just isn’t a problem.  I couldn’t click on my invisibility button cause my mouse wasn’t working, but I was just tab targeting to spread my threat around.  Someone even commented that the whole group was good (or better than usual), as the only ones lower on the damage meters than the tank were the healers.

So we head for the back door to complete this awesome run, when the inevitable happens… our shadow priest leaves due to work commitments.  Little did we realise at that point how our fortunes were about to turn.

We start clearing the trash while looking for one more, and very soon get him, so we turn around and head for Nightbane.  1st attempt, we get him to 50 something percent.  We handled the 1st transition perfectly, but then it all went south.  2nd attempt started with the southerly turn.. so we gave up on the big bony dragon and headed to Curator.

Curator piece of cake.. down just after 2nd evocation, ok things are looking up right? wrong!

I don’t really know what happened after that, but the raid just wasn’t coming together.  We only hit Shade of Aran after that (well we did Chess, just, after we gave up on Aran), but we somehow spent close enough to 1.5 hours there (well, from our 1st attempt on Nightbane to giving up on Aran was 2 hours according to my expiring pot).  The fights with Aran were going so well, but would just fall apart… then people would accidentally jump off the ramp outside Aran’s room and, well, /sigh

One a personal note, I discovered 3 things that made me happy for the night.

1. I can remember back when I was dreaming of breaking 1,000 + spell damage (fire specifically).  It seemed so far away and impossible.  Yet when I buffed up in my boss gear (so a little less +damage), I was sitting on +1,280.. I was pretty happy about that.
2. I have read so often about people doing +1,000 dps.. how easy it is etc… I have always found it elusive.  Normally on a good night I will be racking up mid 800′s to low 900′s, but I never see 1,000.  But I just happened to check my “last fight” entries in Recount on a couple of trash fights.  The 1st one I was just over 1,000 dps (I was so excited I whispered my main competition the rogue).  next fight I was just over 1,100 dps.  I know that they were trash, and don’t really count, but I was stoked anyway.
3. I took my Darkmoon Card: Crusade for test run.  I only recently got it, and was loath to replace my current trinkets, especially in my +hit boss gear.  Anyway, I thought I would take it for a test drive in my trash gear… man I love it!  I was getting 2-3 stacks per scorch, so it was normally sitting on 10 stacks (+80 damage) after a few casts.. and it just kept on giving.  Ohh, if you have one, and didn’t know, you can stack it using polymorph… so polymorph a critter, over and over before you start combat, and you are already fully stacked.. if you time it right you will regen the mana to cover the casts.

I guess best of all, my friend that I put on ignore last week had a whole new attitude (my email to him must of done the trick), so the night, no matter the bad ending, was fun.

Gnomer and Out!