Rindis.com

I haven’t written much on WoW lately, because there hasn’t been a lot to say. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on. Just a lack of attention and humorous anecdotes.

The big news, that got discussed elsewhere was the guild trading servers.

It could have gone better. This disrupted things somewhat, and in addition to other pressures and interests in my life, means I spent a fair amount of time with barely any WoW at all.

But recently, the guild has started getting its act together, and there’s been a string of instance runs all aimed at getting various lower level characters through some quests, and to work out some group dynamics. Smudge described the beginning of that sequence.

The day after we had a Scarlet Monastery run for a couple of mid-levels (Shrimpette & Farmishi), and some higher levels that had gone zooming past the proper area for SM in the weeks that it took to get the run going. And there’s been an improbable number of SM runs during all this.

And two weeks ago Team Band-Aid got together for a spur-of-the moment Stockades run that went fairly well. We got a wipe when we got feared into another room during a boss fight, but hey….

Last week we did a Sunken Temple run. We scheduled four up-and coming characters who are going to get some group practice in this fun instance, with Blanc tanking for them. One of them couldn’t make it, so Dunain filled in. ^_^ So two of us were over-level veterans, and Brunev’s player had been there before. So Thermidor and Noxlux were the ‘newbies’. Overall, we had the firepower to make it a very smooth run, and the main danger for much of it was getting hopelessly lost. But the point is to get the new people some practice in a group, in the higher-pressure environment of an instance. They did very well, better, I think, than the original team had done in its first several instances. We did have one wipe when I got too close to a group that we neglected to clear out before a boss fight. Eranikus was still not any sort of easy, but we got him on the first try, which is a large step up. ^_^

And yesterday we sent a Horde group into Wailing Caverns as Fickle Moos first instance run on the new server. This was mostly Horde alts (Uhgreah for Micca/Blanc; Thutt for Euphel/Dejek; Grondaq for Blondiewood/Tsula), and Malzina – my main Hordie, who I spend too little time on, considering she’s in high level range for WC, and is as old as the 40+ level characters on Moos. Anyway, this was my first time in Wailing Caverns, so all I knew were a few things from looking over Smudge’s shoulder and going “you’re still in there?”

Anyway, I find I like a lot of the low-level ‘introductory’ instances, and the Caverns are no exception. It’s very nice, and very big. Pack a lunch. We had some concerns about going in with no healing or tank (hunter, mage, and two warlocks!), so we went with the idea that the warlocks would use their voidwalkers, and we’d have three critters to share in general tanking duties (including RosePetal, Uhgreah’s pet). It actually worked out fairly well for us. We had two wipes, that I don’t think could have been avoided (well the situation could have been, but not the wipe once we had the situation). We lept down into one tunnel and got a small horde of monsters comming after the voidwalkers when they went the long way (Uhgreah, more used to stupid pet tricks, had her’s on ‘stay’); and we got a critter calling out to its friends, that managed to get a bunch from another level of the cave complex. In both cases we gave a good account of ourselves, but couldn’t make it work.

This was also my first real party instance run with Malzina, and I’m continuing to find I really like mages, though I need to practice some more on my movement control. I let myself get beaten up more than I should. ^_^