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Well, the guild did it’s primary Zul’Ferrak run on Friday. The five highest members went in with all the quests, and all but one of them ended the evening one level higher than they began.

To a certain extent, there’s not a lot to say. We had a player death during a really big fight (giving our druid her first in-combat use of her rez ability ^_^), and one wipe from when a group respawned on top of us when we were already in combat.

After getting used to Uldaman and it’s multi-part quests, Zul’Ferrak is surprisingly small for it’s level. Even more surprising is the extremely small space between entering the area and entering the instance. It was fun. It was a nice instance (and I’m all for more reasonably sized ones), but a little shy of fun stories on this run.

Well, one: We’d just killed a named monster who dropped a nice item. Right after the rogue ended up with it, it was pointed out that it was more of a druid item. Not a big deal, but at that point business with The Move interrupted us. By the time that was done, the monster had respawned and we still needed to get across the area he was in. So we killed him again. And he dropped… the same item. So rogue and druid got a matching pair.

In further news: Smudge had recently had trouble with her alt, Shrimpette. Her and Thermidor had gone down into the Deadmines so Shrimpette could do the full set of Deadmines quests, with Thermidor providing the high-level firepower to replace the rest of the normal 5-man (-Gnome) party. Remembering how tough the final encounter was when Blanc and Dunain did it alone when they were both much higher level than Shrimpette, I offered the services of my alt. I was (unsurprisingly) turned down, and when Smudge showed me Thermi running around and dragging back 5-6 guys for the pair of them to incinerate to ashes, I have to say it was looking a lot better than I thought it would. Then the first boss wiped them both out. They ran back and continued on easily enough, but that was the first boss. The last one repeatedly wiped them out for two hours before they recruited Coppercheetah/Thermi’s roommate (Jareth) to help out.

To add insult to injury, Shrimpette discovered the next day that she had never gotten a quest item off that first boss (probably despawned too soon).

So last night, Shrimpette and Farmishi went into the Deadmines. Considering that Farmishi is 11 levels below Thermidor, we played it a bit conservatively. Farmishi brings several abilities that the other party did not have: healing, resurrection, and the ability to absorb a lot of punishment.

The first major encounter in the instance was bad. We ended up with about three people initially. I was too busy to properly use my ‘don’t run away’ ability. So we got runners. And we got more people to fight. I kept Shimpette up and going for a while, but she eventually fell. Leaving me with about 4 enemies, little mana, and, oh yes, more runners bringing in more enemies. Common wisdom says a Paladin without mana is a dead Paladin.

Four minutes later the last guy in my little corner of the Deadmines dropped. (They had all come helpfully running at me, thanks to all the runners.) Once the mana recharged, I rezzed Shrimpette and we looted the 12+ corpses (which I had generally fought 3-5 at a time). I then noticed that I was still wearing the ‘fancy’ leather armor instead of the much better mail armor that I actually use in combat. ;^_^

The rest of the run was a snap. Sneed’s Shredder and then Sneed went down. Shrimpette got the Sprinkelsprocket. Total time: a bit over an hour, including jogging from Stormwind to the Deadmines and back.