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The only WoW run this last weekend was yet another BRD run on Sunday. The main motivation was that Dunain had built up a large amount Dark Iron Ore, and wanted to do a bar run to get Thorium Brotherhood rep and get it out of his inventory. So more of a regular group, no Farmishi this time.

It went… okay. The Lyceum is just trouble. We did do a Jail Break for Jariedthe as well as a complete run for the Emperor. Only 3 Captains in the back this time, giving us 5 total for the run. Official count: Anvilrage Captains: 31, Plans 0.

The main attraction on the weekend previous was a Dire Maul West run. Very interesting and challenging.

The main thing that goes on there is deactivating a bunch of large crystals that are powering a field that is holding a powerful demon in check (which you then kill, of course…). These turn out to be guarded by a ring of mana elementals (they look like a blue version of the normal fire elemental model). Once we had cleared the front area, we got our first crack at one of these. The elementals stand in a ring around the crystal, and it goes out when the last elemental is killed. We pulled one, and his two neighbors pulled with him, but not the rest of the ring.

It was a painful wipe.

They take enough damage to require some effort to put down, do decent physical damage from the looks of it, and just way too much shadow or nature spell damage (depending on the exact type). If you’re wondering why DM East is the toughest of the three parts of Dire Maul, I don’t think you need to look any further than these elementals. We did get a couple of them, and after that we were able to pull one of the ‘edge’ ones, and were able to take out him and the one buddy that came with him without any trouble.

So, you can imagine our enthusiasm when we got through a few other parts of the instance (including a fairly nasty group of ghosts), and got to the next crystal. However, this time only one elemental pulled. Careful examination shows that there seems to be one or two that are positioned slightly further away from the others, and that’s how you ‘crack the ring’.

Overall, not bad for our first time in. One or two full wipes, two partials (I feigned for one, and one I managed to down the last enemy right before he would have gotten me and turned on Noxlux), and a couple single deaths.

This marks the last “full” five-man area we hadn’t done yet. There’s some things we haven’t done, and certainly some bosses we haven’t defeated, but we’ve seen the main content. Our next plan is for a Dire Maul East run to start catching up several people who haven’t done it yet.