Well, the guild continues to grow. Got two new members last night. I guess we’re still spreading the word to our friends about how much fun we’re having. ^_^ This puts us at… 11 people with active characters, plus three others who helped get the guild official, but aren’t currently playing on the server. (I think I counted everybody….)

We also did an Uldaman run on Saturday. Every available higher-level character showed up (seven people). For three of us it was the second run, and we were going ‘Back to Uldaman‘.

So we broke up into two groups and started getting everyone caught up. We eventually ended up with a second run later that evening that involved the three old hands plus two of the more aggressively-leveling newer characters (Dunain’s the second-oldest character in the guild by quite a bit, but he may well be the third or fourth to hit Level 60).

Dunain and Blanc had visited Uldaman once before. Everyone else had been there before on other servers. So the two highest-level characters knew the least about what to expect. This got farcical when we reenacted Raiders of the Lost Ark and opened the Hidden Chamber — only to be confronted with a Level ‘??’ giant. Fortunately, she’s slow, and gave the party time to reorganize. This wasn’t nearly as much fun when the party got overwhelmed by an insane number of scorpids. I then got to learn about a neglected Hunter Area of Effect ability, and then paniced when the survivors decided they didn’t like me more than they didn’t like the tank.

We eventually did all the current round of quests for Uldaman, after a detour down to what looks like the final room of the instance. We looked around, and decided we wanted no part of that. An insane number of ‘vibro golems’ all ringed around one gigantic one. After running into a few of these upstairs, my guess is that you fight the entire outer ring of them, one at a time (I think about 32 of them), then the inner ring of eight, one at a time, and then the big guy in the center, plus the two standing outside the room. The trick is to keep the party up and running for the entire length of the combat. We’ll find out on a later run.

We’re not done with Uldaman yet, there’s further quests to be done, not to mention helping more guild members get through the quests we completed Saturday. It’s a big place, we’ve seen most of it, but not all…. It also encompasses a fair number of levels: The early part entirely held gray creatures for Dunain (generally, 5 or more levels below his, not considered a challenge or worth experience), the middle had greens (3 or 4 levels below), and the ending sections had constant yellow critters (+/- 2 levels). Considering this was an instance, almost everything was ‘Elite’: extra challenging and tough. And I was the second highest character there; our lowest level character was having problems doing anything offensive by the end, and was being regarded as a tasty snack by many of the monsters. Fortunately, she could still heal us quite fine.

By the time we left and did all our quest turn-ins it was… 3 AM. Starting earlier is going to be imperative, as I understand that the instances keep getting bigger and more complicated at the higher levels (short of focused encounter instances like Blackrock Spire). I’d be happy for a few more instances about the size of Blackfathom Depths.