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Had a busy weekend, not least due to WoW-activities. Friday was our second attempt at the Black Morass.

A while ago, coming off the success of Old Hillsbrad, we went into the Morass to try the second part of the Caverns of Time. …It didn’t go well. It’s a very tough and demanding encounter. Yeah, one. You clear some of the surrounding area, talk to Medivh (who really needs to relax…), and the Infinite Dragonflight shows up. The party has to take down elites that show up out of portals, when the elite is down, the portal closes, and the next portal opens. There’s eighteen portals with the sixth, twelfth, and eighteenth having bosses instead of normal elites. This keeps the party busy, and doesn’t provide much chance for rest.

Oh, did I mention that the portals release a steady stream of non-elites who go straight for Medivh that have to be killed before they can take the shield protecting him down?

We could get to about the fifth wave or so before being overwhelmed. This time things were a bit different. Blanc and Dunain were not yet 70 when we tried it, and overall equipment is better now.

Blanc, me, Grumbly, Blondiewood, and Noxlux went in…. And we still couldn’t do it. We did several attempts, and had various problems. We did get tantalizingly close, getting all the way to the 17th wave… which we were still taking down when the last boss showed up. We were just in too poor of a shape to bounce back, but we were close. All the other attempts generally fell apart around the second boss.

It was annoying, especially so since it was obvious we *could* do it, but just couldn’t get all the way through the fight to the end.

Saturday was an Underbog run for Shrimpette. It went smoothly, except for the end. For some reason, the Black Stalker put the party through the ringer, killing three people, and with Blondie succumbing to a damage-over-time right afterwards, leaving Nox to rez everyone.

After that, we decided to take one more try at the Black Morass. With some alt-shuffling, we ended up with the same team as Friday, except switching out Noxlux for Asclepius. This was a help, since Asc has completed Black Morass with pick-up groups (I still don’t understand how…).

The strategy was the same as previous, and close to the standard: Blanc tanks the elites, Blondie and I grind them down with damage, Asc keeps us healed, Grumbly sticks near the Dark Portal and takes out the non-elites on their way in. Sometimes I take them out when Grumbly needs a break. Note that Grumbly was doing his own healing with bandages and the such.

An interesting note by the way, the second boss is immune to Taunt… but not to Growl. Lance pulled him off of Blanc very easily.

The first time… did not go well. We ended up with multiple portals open and spewing out critters after the second boss. We think it may have gotten up to three, and we burned it back down to two before it fell apart on us.

With it having been a close thing, and that being something no one else has mentioned, we decided that might have been a bug, and reset the instance and tried again despite it being later than everyone really wanted to stay up.

And it was… an amazingly smooth run. Everything went smoothly, we powered our way through the last few waves in record time and were well prepared for the last boss… who wasn’t prepared for us. ^_^

Sunday was a Guild barbecue hosted by Thermi and Jariedthe. Sadly some bad news threw a wet blanket on the celebration (I don’t think it’s my place to say more here), but we managed a good time anyway.decided to make a new Blood Elf warlock, and everyone else followed suit, giving us a party of five new blood elves of various classes dashing from place to place denuding the landscape of monsters wherever we went (Locusts of the Fickle Muse…). It was confusing, unorganized, and silly fun.

Between BackBreaker being busy and my other hobbies, haven’t spent as much time on WoW lately. However, that’s not to say nothing’s happened. In fact, we had a very exciting run this last Sunday.

We’ve been trying, without success, to get through the level-70 wing of Auchindoun. This last time we decided on something slightly easier, Shattered Halls, the third wing of Hellfire Citadel (and technically the easiest of the level-70 instances).

As it turned out, none of our party (Blanc, Dunain, Blondiewood, Grumbly, Asclepius) had been through the entire thing. In fact, the only prior experience there was was from when Blanc, Blondie and I tried to three-man part of it. We got through the second room before encountering a group that we couldn’t do.

It’s a nice instance. Blizzard has done a nice job with a different set of challenges than the normal fare. We wiped three times, and none of those was on a boss. Sadly, Lance had the highest death rate I’ve seen yet. There’s a lot of high-damage melee types that Lance just cannot handle tanking (especially while he’s still 67), but we needed the extra bit of fight control. In those fights where we could avoid doing that, it was much better.

The first real challenge of the instance are the initial groups. You can pull many of them separately, but they will get replacements for anyone you pick off. The key is the Legionnaire in the middle. Until he dies, the group will keep getting replacements forever.

The other parts that stick out in my mind are a couple of areas where one or two monsters and maybe some non-elites will regularly show up. It really rewards a party that can handle situations on the fly and keep moving. The first one is a kind of slime-pit that you get at through a hole in the wall to get around a locked door (and immediately got a bunch of Star Wars references), and the second is an advance down a corridor while flaming arrows are being shot at/around you.

It’s certainly the toughest thing we’ve gone through, and should help put us on the right track for a successful return to Shadow Labyrinth later. Oh, and Dunain dinged 68 part way through the instance. ^_^

Well, Burning Crusade‘s been out for about two months now, and there’s a lot to talk about, so this is likely to get very long. ^_^;

First off, our guild currently has four 70s in it. I am at the back of the pack with Dunain at 64 and Farmishi hitting 63 yesterday. (An interesting kind of ‘check-uary’ there, everyone’s so used to thinking of the final run up to 60, that it’s natural to say “54” when you mean “64”….) Admittedly, I am slowed down some by the fact I have other hobbies (like playing ASL with Patch).

Overall, I like Burning Crusade. Blizzard has done a wonderful job with all the new content. I do have some overall minor gripes. The hardware specs got pushed up with the expansion, and there’s no real acknowledgment of this anywhere in the promo material, leaving me to be surprised when my machine practically falls over dead the first time I go in Zangarmarsh (turning everything down to minimum has allowed it to be tolerable…). Beyond just the number of people who had marginal systems to begin with, I’m sure there’s a fair number who needed to adjust settings, and I think a little warning of this fact would have been prudent. Anyway, the other gripe is that I think they notched the item quality in Outland up too high. I understand that they want offer something to all those in their Tier 2/3 epics short of the new endgame content, but the random base world-drop/quest reward greens beating most of the blues our guild had seems a bit much to me.

I realized shortly after the release of BC, that I would probably prefer to switch to Farmishi as my main instead of Dunain. Along with this came the realization that the time to make the switch was a month before BC came out, so that I could position her properly. So, Dunain’s still my main… for now. The real obstacle is that they are both blacksmiths, and Dunain still has a good lead on her.

The guild as a whole is still getting the various crafting skills up, and we’re mostly entering the time when the recipes start actually wanting unusual items. Material du jour? Primals. Primal Earth, Primal Fire, Primal Life, Primal Mana… you name it and there’s something to collect of it. Last night was largely spent by the guild at large in collecting these types of materials to make Riding Crops for our high-levels. Dunain has just hit this type of thing himself, and the nice little store I’d built up isn’t nearly enough. But it looks like a little effort will keep Blanc in new armor nicely.

We’ve done a number of instance runs, though they’ve dropped off a bit lately. The highest one I’ve seen so far is the Mana Tombs in Auchindoun. Very nice, and we did pretty well, especially for a first run. Sadly, Dunain was too low level to get any quest for the place, so we need to do it again for him.

On the way to new endgame equipment, there’s a few options. There’s some small sets in the crafted items, a good number of very nice greens, and then there’s recolored versions of Dungeon 1 items. These last are generally nice socketed blue items from instance bosses geared towards the particular class who’s set it looks like. They start dropping in the first instances of BC, and are generally also the first socketed items you’re likely to see.

Anyway, I happened to get the breastplate for Farmishi’s set early, and thought it looked really nice. After finding out about the full set, I decided to get them all. So we ended up in our second round of Coilfang Reservoir runs about a week ago. Naturally, this is where the next pieces drop, and I figured Farmishi would be spending a fair amount of time in there getting all three pieces available. The runs went very well, and we did both of the low-level wings in one evening.

…And it turns out that it was Pally Night at Coilfang, as everything she wanted dropped, including some Warrior gear she can use for tanking (Smudge was on Shrimpette, so Farmishi was the only one present who could even use it). All told, Farmishi got five new pieces of equipment… only one of which she could immediately use. The other four all required level 63, and she was still part way through 62. Last night she finally made 63, and is looking quite snappy.

So now Farmishi wants to go to… the Mana Tombs. However, given the equipment and quests, she’s going to wait until she tips over into 54 64.