There’s been a few small and big things to talk about recently.

A couple weeks ago, Drew gave me some RAM for Haruhi (in fact, he was somewhat forceful). I had supposed much of my problems with WoW were from an anemic graphics card. After going from 512 MB to 2 GB, I have found out that isn’t the case at all. It’s still not going to do anything fancy in the game, but at least I can switch out to the browser (for WoWiki or Thottbot), and I can turn my settings up from the bare minimum.

Dunain has collected keys for all five Heroic instances. This has allowed me some time to work on Farmishi again, and last Tuesday it finally happened:

Farmishi hit level 70 in the middle of a Shattered Halls run (much like Dunain, now that I think of it). She was able to buy all her skills and flying mount immediately. (It seemed very strange to buy a mount for her.) Now I just need a way to get epic flying mounts on two characters….

Along with gearing up for some Heroic runs, we’ve been getting ready for Kharazan. This last week featured a push to get more characters keyed, with a Shadow Labyrinth run on Sun, a double-header of Steamvaults and Arcatraz on Wed and the Black Morass on Friday. Jariedthe needed to finish up the chain, and while Smudge and I already had our mains keyed, we were wanting to get Shrimpette and Farmishi keyed as well.

Most of the runs I’ve been on as Farmishi lately have been very smooth, to my surprise. Sadly, the Black Morass run did not follow. We were plagued by two problems, one, knocking down an elite was taking long enough that it was being a problem for Thermidor to keep burning down the non-elites coming through the portal long enough. Second, Farmishi was playing main tank, and really relies on someone hitting her to generate threat. The mage-types were very hard for her to hang on to. That said, the second run nearly got through the second boss (the toughest part) even after Farmishi died early on in the battle. For some reason, we just couldn’t get it that good again, and I eventually swapped over to Dunain to repair the group’s biggest problem: damage. Jariedthe tanked, and everything went very well. Farmishi will just have to get her key later; I’m planning on using Dunain in Kharazan for quite a while, so it’s not a big deal. Ironically, the last boss dropped an item for Dunain, and an item for Farmishi, so I would have been fine either way.

The next day, Fickle Muse turned out most of the A-team for the first trip into Kharazan. Sadly, we haven’t seen Noxlux lately, and Asclepius turned out to be kidnapped by a sushi dinner that went for 8 hours…. This not only left us at only six people (Blanc, Dunain, Grumbly, Blondiewood, Thermidor, and Jariedthe), but no actual priest. We knew we’d need to PUG for the last few slots, but we were hoping to bring all the essentials, and not have to be too picky. It took about an hour to fill the group, with three slots (including a priest) coming from the guild TrollBraggers (a very nice group), and a fourth being someone that a couple of us had known for a bit, Marabella.

We had all been coached (especially by Grumbly and Blanc, who’d been there before) that Kharazan is a very tough place, and that our goal that night was just to get to the first boss (Attumen – technically optional) and defeat him. Not that it was a long epic struggle, it’s just that the monsters in his area respawn after 25 minutes (!), so a failed attempt probably means clearing the way to him again.

We actually did fairly well. Some deaths on the way, but we made good progress, kept moving, and reached Attumen. And we wiped. We got back, found nobody had respawned yet, and tried again. It went much better, and we got him down. Blanc got the Vambraces of Courage, our first Khara gear!

After recovering/repairing from that, we turned around to go after the first true/required boss of the instance, Moroes. Fighting up through the ball room to the banquet hall, where he is, was interesting. Moroes, however….

He comes with four elites standing next to him that would be nasty enough as a non-boss fight group. Moroes is a nasty customer on his own – he needs two tanks to control as he’ll periodically incapacitate one. Which left us really short on ways to deal with the other four. Crowd control is the generally preferred method, but as they’re undead, mages (what we have plenty of) don’t do as much.

We tried twice, getting two of the adds down the second time, before people had to start going to bed. We arranged to try again Sunday, with much the same group. Our healer from TrollBraggers turned out to be unavailable, but Asclepius was here this time.

Moroes didn’t really go any better. As part of the secondary control, I get to ice trap and kite one of secondaries, not something I’m used to trying to do.

The fight itself (at least so far) is wild. There’s insane amounts of damage flying around and a desperate attempt by the non-tank, non-healing parts of the party to burn through the four secondaries before all the control fails. So far it hasn’t happened. There was one time I was particularly happy with where I did a good job of keeping my guy down, but we lost healing early, and it all flew apart just as it was getting somewhere.

Instead of beating ourselves up all night, we went over to the servant’s quarters, the easiest part of Kharazan, but generally only worth reputation. We cleared the area (the spiders are particularly nasty, make sure to use stealth detection around the visible spiders), but didn’t see the mini-boss appear, so we went upstairs to the guest chambers. I’m afraid I blew that one, and got too close to a group that wiped us.

We ended up the night by going after the ‘beast boss’ when he appeared as we started re-clearing our way through. The conventional wisdom is that the items they drop are mostly just worth disenchanting, but the Shaman in our group from TrollBraggers was very happy with the bracers that dropped.

So, overall, a little better than we’d been warned, and we’ll be back next weekend.