Holy crap!

We finally did it! Our little 10 man guild got the Lich King down last week! I think the kill had several factors to it.

First, we had the same 10 man crew working at him for the third consecutive raid night. Typically our raids fluctuate a bit, with maybe 80% of the raid being constant. But I think that finally having a crew where everyone had seen and experienced the fight several several times really helped. Plus, having the same 10 man crew meant that we communicated well and knew what to expect from each other.

Second, there was definitely a luck component to it. I think getting two dps, Darc and Indi, as opposed to healers, sucked into the Frostmourne was a huge help. Oh, and our lock Buns got picked up by the Valkyr a couple times which is always helpful as well. It was always cute when Buns would get picked up and folks would start running, to which Buns would be like "No, no, its ok guys, its me!" then use her demonic puppet show thing.

Third, everything is better with druids, isn't it? And we had three druids. Having those extra innervates really helped me since I was always riding the edge with mana. Oh and 3 battlerezes rocks. Even if it makes Jess freak out and call out something like "Indi! Indi! B-b-b-b-" when asking Indi to brez Darc. Plus don't forget that druids up the awesomely cute quotient by like a bazillion.

This is the first time our little guild has finished an end of expansion boss. And as we don't do 25 mans, for us this is it. Well except for hard modes, I guess. I am very much looking forward to seeing some gear upgrades drop off some of the hard modes of lower bosses in ICC. The heroic version of the staff of Saurfang makes me drool a little: Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff.

Anyways, I'm excited our guild finished ICC. We finished Kara as a guild a little over two years ago. Then came Naxx, Ulduar, and ToC. I'm incredibly proud that the guild has remained constant through raids, through time, through real life, through people coming and going. We've never been a guild that is going to push to compete for server firsts. But we've raided our way amongst a group of crazy friends, and for that, I'm proud.

Now we just have to get the folks who missed the kill their Kingslayer titles!

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Left Claw's musical ICC

Last week was Kalthan's last week of playing WoW. Thus, I wanted to plan a little something different for his last raid with us and planned a musical ICC run. Now we did a musical Kara run back in the day, what 2 years ago? I remember choosing Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy for Attumen, Mr. Roboto for Curator, and Dire Straits' Romeo and Juliet for Opera. For some reason we didn't do a musical Ulduar or ToC.

In planning the musical ICC run for Kal, I got a couple great suggestions from Bell's post a couple months back. But I also tried to pick songs that I personally liked and tried to expand my options by thinking of songs that may fit boss mechanics/raid instructions. So here's what was played:

1. Marrowgar: Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Round
2. Deathwhisper: Eagles - Witchy Woman
3. Gunship: Elton John - Rocket Man
4. Saurfang: U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday
5. Festergut: Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
6. Rotface: Van Morrison - Come Running
7. Putricide: Britney Spears - Toxic
8. Blood Council: Police - Don't Stand So Close to Me
9. Blood Queen: Def Leppard - Love Bites
10. Dreamwalker: Cranberries - Dreaming my Dreams
11. Sindragosa: Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby

It was fun though because we learned some more facts about each other, like the fact that Shmoo has an adverse reaction to Witchy Woman and my guildies heard about how much I was in love with Def Leppard back in the day. A couple of guildies lost heals from me when they talked bad about Van Morrison and the song for Dreamwalker was partly for Jess, who is a big Cranberries fan. I think I also seriously pained a number of guildies by making them listen to Britney for Putricide (a great great suggestion by Nikolai).

All in all, it was a nice change of pace from our typical ICC runs and it was a fun way to commemorate Kal's last run.

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Yay Dreamwalker!

I think I missed posting our guild screenshots of our Rotface and Blood Queen kills from a while back, but look!

Not only did I post our Dreamwalker SS, but I made it all purty-like with inspiration from Kae. Yay! Though I guess this isn't really a kill, cuz we didn't kill her. Hmmm. Dreamwalker save? And she's so purty. I wish she'd stayed around for the picture.

Last night was our second night of working on her, though our first night was a bit ago and we all know with my short term memory that I barely remember that first night. It was definitely a fight where we had to really strategize and adjust as we went through our wipes. I was healing along with our pally Nico and our priest Suzzy.

We all went in the portals to take advantage of the buffs, but all of us were also healing on the outside as well. After some trial and error, we ultimately had Suzzy go in portals 1, 2, and 3; I went in portals 1, 3, and 5; and Nico went in portals 2, 4, and 6 (though I can't remember if he really went in 6 or not... I think it may have been over by then).

With this portal strategy, it meant that we had one healer outside during the first three portals, but two healers outside during the later portals when the adds started to speed up and the raid and tanks started to take some more damage. It was good because it forced all of us to practice and learn the portal phase (which I need to get better at). And we all had to learn how to balance healing the raid. It may have not been the best or most effective strategy but it worked for us while the tanks and raid were learning how to best assign, prioritize, and manage the adds.

I used a macro to target her, but I still felt really clumsy coming out of the portals or switching from raid members back to her. Maybe I just have to get used to it more with time and practice. But Suzzy's Guardian Spirit and Nico's Beacon were great, but our secret weapon to getting her down? Nikolai and Shmoo putting their Gift of the Naaru on her! I mean having one Gift of the Naaru is awesome, but with two, we were totally OP. :p

Its nice for us to be able to balance some moderate level of strict 10 progression, with what I feel is the crux of our guild, folks who genuinely enjoy raiding with each other. Sometimes our raids are just so incredibly hilarious. Case in point, the scene before a Blood Queen pull a week ago.

Buns: It killed my sheep!
K: Huh? What?
Someone: Yeah, the little sheep pet has a mechanic where a wolf comes and kills it.
K: Aw, so sad!

Let's just pause here a sec and look at how cute our lock Buns is right now.

I just love how she's sorta sheepishly peering out underneath her hat. Don't let her fool you though. She's incredibly cute, but she will kick your freakin' ass.

Let's get back to my recollection of the crazy raid chat from that night:

Shmoopsypoo yells: OMG BALSAMIC VINEGAR AND BASIL TRISCUITS! SO GOOD!
Nikolai: (stands facing raid on steps down into Blood Queen) /clears throat
Veloreynn: /claps for Nikolai
Nikolai: Are you all ready for this? Can you handle it?
Nikolai buffs raid with Stamina
Nikolai: Did you like that? How'd that feel? Do you want more? Can you handle more?
Nicolause: /nods at Nikolai
Shmoopsypoo yells: OMG BALSAMIC VINEGAR AND BASIL TRISCUITS!!!
Nikolai: Here it comes kids!
Nikolai buffs raid with Spirit
K: /cheers at Nikolai
Nikolai: You thought that was all, eh? Well there's more! You ready?
Nikolai buffs raid with Shadow Protection
Nikolai bows
Shmoopsypoo yells: OMG BALSAMIC VINEGAR AND BASIL TRISCUITS!!!

Geez what a drama queen that Nikolai. But we love him. :) And yes, sometimes we drive Jess/raid leader crazy. I'm wondering if this was a Sunday night? Our Sunday nights are always the crazy nights.

Now this doesn't even get into the myriad of naughty raid chat that is inevitable on Blood Queen when we have to talk about biting each other. For example, folks have asked each other (and people's spouses) if there is a specific location where someone would like to be bitten. Though for some reason, I'm guessing we're not the only raid that has taken this biting mechanic to a slightly naughty turn in raid chat.

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Guild update, K's birthday, and a lesson

It's been a while since I've talked about our guild's raiding adventures. Well to be honest, we had about 3 weeks in January where we were only able to pull together one raid night a week. There had been a number of positive life changes for guildies that cut down available raid nights. So while it was sort of frustrating to have such little raiding time, you couldn't help but be happy for such positive life changes in guildies' lives such as new jobs, moves, and family additions.

On a bad front, we've had to deal with absences due to technical difficulties. It just seems that the computing requirements to run WOW get greater and greater. Seriously, are we going to need super computers to run this game a year from now? Anyways, we've temporarily lost our cutest male gnome mage Nkm due to this. We miss ya Nkm! Sammy is so lost without you that he is running around Dalaran in a haze muttering "Nkm... battered hilt... cyber session..." Its really quite sad.

Back on a positive front, our pally healer extraordinaire Nicolause is back. And I am hopeful that our old friend Adamas is coming back to the game after a 6 month absence. Yes, this is the same Adamas who was the first guy I ever whispered or partied with in game. He randomly popped on our vent server the other night to say hello, which was awesome.

So recently things have finally turned around in terms of decent amount of raiding time. Here we are with Festergut last week. I was especially pleased that we were able to two heal it. It was tight (remember we are all in 10 man gear), and super mad crazy healing, but we did it.

Here we are with Blood Princes this past week. It was also a pretty tough healing fight but I have to give props to our hunter Kal for soloing the beach ball game so well.

Talking to Adamas on vent the other night made me think back fondly to K's start in this game. And it just so happens that today is the third birthday of me first playing this game, and the birth of Keredria as a toon! Is it odd that I remember this date? Hmmm. Oh and Jess put together a super cute post celebrating what I've spent the past 3 years doing in game and took along my sproutling. Way cute. Though I don't remember agreeing to Jess babysitting, but whatever. The sproutling even got bathed, so that's a bonus!

Finally, an important lesson for y'all. So I've recently realized that I've picked up a bit of a pooch, well bigger than I want or need, over the last year or so. So I think to myself:

Self, maybe you can try to combine playing WOW with doing some form of exercise! You can play the game you love while working on toning up!

This thought then had me making the brilliant decision that maybe I should play WOW while sitting/bouncing/doing some form of crunches on one of those large exercise bouncy balls. Now I would never ever raid on a bouncy ball, because I mean come on, I am a serius bzness raider right? But on a simple 5 man daily heroic? No problem! Right?

Well one of these days, I was doing the daily in Trial of the Champion with Wut and Jess. I think I started bouncing/doing crunches and kind of overdid it and bounced myself off the ball a bit. Oh and oops, Jess died. And the dps DK died. Though for the record, Wut was tanking and these two dps were grabbing some aggro off of Wut. So not totally my fault... though they probably would not have died if I was sitting on a stable surface.

Lesson here? Be careful if you decide to play WOW while exercising on a bouncing ball. (You heard it here first guys!) I ended up sort of sheepishly admitting this to Jess the next day.

It made me wonder though, are there any absolutely crazy things that you do while playing or raiding that would totally floor your guildies if they could see you?

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Raiding update

We haven't been able to do much lately in terms of raiding progression, in part due to what I call the dominoes effect. You see, earlier this month we temporarily lost our dress, er kilt wearing pally healer Nicolause. He's doing US Navy training things somewhere until mid next month. In a 10 man raiding guild, losing one person, especially a healer is a huge deal.

Because Nico has been away, Jess has switched over to shammy healing and we have to hear "Chealz! Chealz!" all the time now, in addition to Makawee standing in the middle of the totems and calling it "the power center". /sigh. So this means that Jess isn't tanking, and as much as I hate to admit it, Jess sorta knows how to do the tanking bzness. So now Qyburn is tanking more, which is fine and all since Qyburn is well geared and knows what he is doing. But when Qyburn tanks, that means that we don't have him on Nkm. And that is sad because as a gnome mage, Nkm routinely tops not only the cute meters, but the dps meters. You see, dominoes!

For the last couple of weeks we just have not had enough raid nights with the right group composition to progress in ICC. We tried two healing Festergut one night, which was very very bad. We then went with three healers another night, and we just didn't have enough dps. /sigh. We've tried Rotface maybe 5 or 6 times and while we haven't gotten him down, its been nice to see definite progress each and every time. Can I just say the word ooze sounds really funny and kinda odd, almost like you're saying it wrong, especially after you hear it on vent so many times? Ooze. Ooooze. Oooooooze. Weird. Is it just me?

Oh, so I picked up Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff from Saurfang a couple weeks ago, and oooh is it shiny. The staff enchant on it is also quite mesmerizing if you stare at it adoringly for a long time. Not that I've ever done that, er... uh...

All in all, while its a bit frustrating to feel that we could be doing better if we had the right raid team, I guess in a way I'm not in a huge hurry since this is the last raid instance before Cataclysm. We will most definitely be finishing ICC later than most raiding guilds. I wonder what folks are supposed to do before Cataclysm comes out when, this fall/winter?

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Icecrown update

I'm not exactly sure how many of y'all even care to hear about our adventures in Icecrown, but to satisfy Simplymod and my guildies, here is my latest Icecrown update.

The guild has been pwned lately by a very big and bad and scary boss, the dreaded holiday boss. Its been very difficult to put together full raids. But we were able to finally get some decent time this past raid week and put in a solid effort in Icecrown. There was a number of people switching in alts to fill needed roles, and we had to bring in some friends outside the guild. Some thoughts and pics.

Lord Marrowgar:

I didn't get a pic on Lady Deathwhisper. The one thing I remember thinking during Jess' raid lecture for this fight was: 'Geez, that is a serius bzness lecture. I'm glad I'm not dps'. A lot of times I'm glad all I have to do is heal and not have to worry about switching targets and blah blah blah. This would require *actually* listening and pay attention to Jess' raid lectures. The horror!

Actually in all seriousness, Jess will tell you that I probably speak up too much or give too much input on how things should be done, considering the healer's perspective. I'm always telling tanks where I would like bosses tanked... where dps should stand... or generally just how I think strats should be tweaked. Bossy tree is bossy. I think this might have been Qyburn's first experience with the dreaded K whispers where I requested some boss positioning. I told Qyburn that I only do this to tanks I like. :)

For the Gunship Battle, obligatory rocket bear pic:

On the gunship battle I was nervous about screwing up when I had to jump over to the other ship. I always failed at jumping off the platform on Thaddius. So um, the first time we did this, I flew over before we were supposed to... and before anyone else did. Oops. /sigh

Now on the second attempt, just before we got it down, Jess jumped over to the other ship. So when we got the credit for the win, Jess and Nkm were on the enemy ship. Haha oops. They had to jump overboard and sacrifice themselves to come back to loot. And oh yeah, loot. This was definitely a tanky weekend. Pretty much every single drop was not only plate, but a tanky drop. Damn Blizz! Ur doing it wrong! Healy drops first! :p

Finally, our Saurfang pic:

We took 6 dps and 2 heals for this fight and I stood near the middle where I had a great view of both sides of dps as they dealt with the beast adds. I loved seeing the dps trade aggro with each other, taunting and ccing the adds before getting them down. We had one unfortunate attempt where two of the three dps on the right side died. Poor Shat, an elemental shammy, was the only one left. I had to bite my lip so that I wouldn't crack up over vent, as the sight of a shammy running around all crazy like his ass was on fire was just hilarious to me. Run, shammy, run!

I think the Saurfang fight was my favorite of the Lower Spire. While it required some stressful healing at times, given we went with two healers, it was just a fun fight to see. I thought the part at the end where his dad comes to pick up his body was quite touching and a bit sad. I honestly felt kind of bad for him. Finally, I'm sure our hunter Kalthan never thought this would happen, but I have to publicly give our deeps props for dealing with the adds so beautifully.

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