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So much for that then July 24, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gear,Instances,Paladin,World of Warcraft , add a comment

After my last post you can imagine my surprise when logging into WoW 5mins before raid time hoping to maybe run Kara that I saw the guild message of the day saying we were doing Magtheridon.  I quickly flicked up the guild roster to see that we had 20 people online, which I’ve not seen for a while.  So yeah, so much for never seeing 25 mans again.

I’m happy to say that we got him down on the third attempt, after some bad luck on the first attempt with the cave in coinciding with a blast nova and then one of our cube clickers lagging right before a blast nova on the second try.  No loots for me there but he doesn’t actually drop anything I want now anyway, my chest is better than the T4 one now.

In recruitment news, we seem to have paladins growing out of our ears now.  There were a total of 6 paladins in that raid, four of them holy.  I wouldn’t mind this so much if they weren’t all so much better geared than me.  As it seems we’re picking up stragglers from all through Tier 4, 5 and 6 we’ve got some people with very nice gear, some for more than one spec and it is making me feel a little inadequate. I am slightly doubting whether I’m up to this hardcore raiding malarkey – I got called out twice before the raid about the lack of enchants on my gear, which is of course a very fair criticism. My main issue with the enchanting of gear is the difficulty of finding an enchanter. I seriously can’t wait till WotLK where enchants will be trade able on the auction house, once that happens you can pretty much guarantee that my gear will be enchanted up as I have no problem spending money at the auction house so simply.

After downing Maggy we got two Karazhan groups together and headed in.  As not everyone had that much time we only did the first 3 bosses. However, I’m very pleased to say that the lil Paladin wannabe – The Maiden of Virtue – finally dropped the Shard of the Virtuous and so that is one slot finally epiced out.  As I intend to get this enchanted I decided not to continue saving for the badge healing mace and instead spent it on the belt instead and also bought an epic gem to help pay for said enchants.

Overall, a pretty satisfying WoW evening. It looks like I may get to see SSC and TK once more, perhaps even Hyjal and BT one day…

Zul’Aman = Cleared July 20, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gaming,Instances,Paladin,World of Warcraft , add a comment

Tonight I took part in my personal first downing of Zul’Jin.  This means that I’ve personally cleared Zul’Aman.  Surprisingly, the fight is kinda easier than I expected. As our raid leader was saying whilst we tried to down the previous boss, Zul’Jin is probably a bit easier.  It’s only his very last phase that gave us any trouble and we downed him at some point around attempt number 5.

Nothing interesting dropped of course but the 3 badges are always nice.

This puts my personal raid progression at

When I first dreamt of how awesome raiding must be, I never even imagined that I would get into the 25 mans, never mind all the way in to Tier 5. As things happen, it may be that I don’t get to see another 25 man until wrath.  Unfortunate drama within the guild (which I wasn’t present for and don’t really know what happened) caused a chunk of the raiders to leave and summer brought about inactivity in more.  We do have a core set of raiders big enough to do 10 mans successfully but I know most of us would love to be killing the big targets in the 25 mans. Our active raiders are trickling away but they are also being replaced. Tonights raid had two trial members in it, the same classes as the two core raiders we recently lost, and both of them seemed to perform very well in their roles so there is still hope to get back on our feet.

Cleaning up May 29, 2008

Posted by Sharny in : Gear,Instances,Paladin,World of Warcraft , add a comment

Just finished an evening of Karazhan with the guild.  We had the people to do two simultaneous teams which is quite promising, we could maybe have pushed 22 or so people.  As such I got the rare event of being the only paladin in my raid which although isn’t normally a particularly uncommon thing I would imagine we have quite a few active paladins so I’m very rarely alone.

The run itself was a breeze, one shotted every boss and I picked up a couple of bits and pieces as well as badges of course. I didn’t pick up any straight upgrades and am still in desperate need of a new weapon, trinket and chest but its all good otherwise.  One thing I really do need is to enchant more of my gear, I really dislike enchanting generally because of the necessary requirement of having contact with the enchanter themselves. It’s just irritating finding a person who can do the enchant, giving them the materials etc.  I wish Blizzard would just hurry the hell up and implement auction house sellable enchants (which they showed they could do in the Arena tournament realms).

In other WoW news, I experience my first 25 man this week, Magtheridon’s Lair.  It would seem that during my time away from WoW my guild has progressed as far as downing the Tier 4 25 mans which is pretty cool really, I’m very pleased with the speed of our progress.  The only downside of this is that I’m starting to feel under geared again, as I was when I joined.  Before I went on my break I was actually one of the better geared healers in the guild, despite starting behind the others.  Now I’m a little bit behind although I’ve healed through the first 4 bosses of Zul’Aman and by the opinion of Be.Imba I shouldn’t even be able to perform at all.  I guess I must be alright at this healing malarkey after all.

Back to what I was actually going to talk about – my first experience of 25 man raiding was pretty chaotic, there was damage appearing everywhere and of course I’m just freaking out because I start to forget that there are 6 other healers helping me deal with it all.  I think I am, at heart, still a 5 man healer but it is being flushed out of me, albeit rather slowly.  We didn’t manage to down big ol Maggy but we were already trying to 22 man it so I’m not really disheartened.  We also didn’t get that many attempts on him because people were needing to go, I think a few more gos and we would have had him as all the problems that we had got dealt with very quickly generally.

I’m really enjoying the raiding with my guild and although I don’t really make any effort to make myself a part of the social side I do enjoy being in the company of the people in the guild.  A lot of them to remind me of the more ambitious people I knew in Runescape, I think there is some kind of hardcore inclined gamer stereotype which just pops up everywhere and it’s kinda interesting to see that here in quite a different environment.