ZOMG I have a stalker!

Log in last night…

The freaks come out at night

My first thought… I’m a sucker for flattery as much as the next mage (and I’m a Leo to boot) but that seems to be laying it on pretty thick. I bet he’s going to ask for a free portal to Dalaran or something. SM runs? 10 gold? Where do these people come from?

A quick shift -click and I see it’s a level 4 blood elf hunter out in the middle of nowhere.

Huh. Out of all the mages logged on, how/why did they latch on to me? And how did they know that Arcane is my damage of choice?

We’re making small talk…

Hmmmm….

And the gears start turning and the smoke starts fuming and someone in guild chat mentions that someone has been looking for me.

/lightbulb

(That should totally be an emote, complete with a little light bulb appearing over your head.)

I whisper back, “Going out on a limb here, Del?”

Sure enough Delerius from the Den of Delerius had crashed was visiting my server!

Tuesday I had done a post about the direction my guild was slowly moving in and Delerius had made a comment that he might be interested in bringing his druid over.

Talk about a fast mover!

I was getting ready to pull a raid together so unfortunately didn’t have a bunch of time to devote to him, but we talked what little we could.

I invited his baby hunter into the guild so he could do a little meet and greet and he jumped fearlessly into the fray.

As much as I want to see progression, I want to see it with people that I like and that get along with each other.

I don’t think anyone scared him off, so we’ll see what he thinks of us. =)

The last 72 hours have probably been the most important for me in relation to the guild. We’ve got a lot of discussion going on and we’re starting to see some results from it. I feel really good about where we are heading.

…

Speaking of a raid I was pulling together…

Invites went out pretty much at 7 and by 7:07 we had 9 people in Onyxia’s Lair clearing trash while waiting for the MT to get home.

I think Ony is a good warm up. It lets us get all the stupid out of our system.

Attempt 1.

This wipe brought to us by the number 6.

Turns out the OT normally keeps a spiffy ability on his 6 key. When he’s in DPS spec.

When he’s in tank spec, that’s a taunt.

So Ony spins and gouts flame all over the healers. And cleaves for good measure .

Attempt 2.

Hunter gets tail whipped into the whelp cave. Same hunter, same cave as last week.

I yell, “50 DKP MINUS” at him.

We actually recovered from the early whelp spawn very quickly and probably would have made it just fine except for the number 6.

I told the OT to tape a thumb tack pointy side up to his 6 key.

Attempt 3 was how it was supposed to be.

The hunter stood right by the rest of us casters this time. I think he’s afraid we might bite or something.

I don’t bite. Hard.

We did take 3 healers, but we’ve graduated from 2 shaman to 1 shaman and a priest with fear ward (3rd healer was a druid again, so no second shaman for totem and no pally for fire aura). Our OT was considerably better geared than our OT last week and that helped take some of the burden off.

2 priest helms dropped!

Thankfully we had a priest or that would have been a lot of justifiable QQ.

Gem bag to the gbank as normal.

I think the MT got a new chest piece… some stuff…

I got a spiffy new off-hand!

I’ve been carrying around that spider on a stick for months now.

Antique Cornerstone Grimoire. Pretty snazzy, has a Use feature to summon a skeleton.

Open roll on the bag and I picked that baby up too. Took me probably 15 minutes after the raids to get my bags all back in proper order.

Off to 10 man ToCr!

We 1-shot everything up to the Twins, even the faction champions (although I did die during that one, a quick b-rez and I was back in the saddle).

Icehowl was so kind as to drop me Scepter of Imprisoned Souls.

With the buff to the Twin Pact ability from 20% to 50% healing, our strategy of having all the DPS on one twin and just forcing our way through it doesn’t work as well anymore. If it happens to the twin we’re on, it’s fine, but when it isn’t, it fails.

So we switched to the Team A on light, Team B on dark strategy and had everyone switch to the appropriate twin during the shield/heal special. We didn’t try to get the correct essence, just did what we could with what buff we had. We did continue to switch essences for the vortex because otherwise we die.

Moving on to Anub we discussed our phase 2 strategy. This has received quite a bit of attention from us on our guild forums because it was where we had the biggest problem. For some reason we were trying a stack method where we stayed clumped together for phase 2. The result it that everyone gets hit with the debuff from the scarabs, Anub is practically on top of his next target when he switches and many more people are being hit by spikes.

We went with the “every man for himself, stay out of spikes, kill bugs” strategy and it worked perfectly.

We went from about 14% of the total raid damage coming from the Acid-Drenched Mandibles debuff last week to about 7.5%. That makes a huge difference in the healing.

We’re almost to the point where we can skip the second submerge phase, we were very close last night.

Anub then dropped Perdition!

/drool

But I just got a new off-hand…

Let me say, the trading raid loot thing has got to be one of the top 3 best things Blizzard has come up with. Ever.

Trade the off-hand to the resto druid (who isn’t real keen on getting his gear enchanted for some reason and off-hands don’t require an enchant) and I am the proud owner of a big stick!

I will not, however, speak softly while carrying my big stick.

Lok’tar ogar!

That's a big stick - That's what she said

(And got my T9 245 gloves from a PuG VoA 25 the other night that rocked the charts!)