Right on Through

So after the exciting first night in Ulduar, I decided to wait and put the second two nights of kills together to save myself some time. I then completely forgot to post any kill shots.

Our second night in Ulduar we spent half the night on Ignis and got him down. Then we headed up and spent a few wipes on Assembly of Iron before getting them down. And even though it was late, we wiped on Kologarn for a while before calling it a night.

Saturday we came back and wiped a little more on Kologarn before finding out the correct usage of heroism which allowed us to wipe the floor with him. After that we spent a hilarious amount of time figuring out which was the best way to pull Auriaya’s stupid pouncing cats. Once we got through the pull with no deaths it was easy.

We don’t care what people think?

If we don’t care what people think about how fast we progress, then why the hell should we care what they think when we want to be a little proud of fast progression?

Being modest has it’s own merits, but even it can be frowned upon in excessive amounts. There’s something to be said for knowing when you’re good and being allowed to be proud of it. And I don’t mean that we should go shove it in everyone’s faces over and over.

We were proud when we downed Kael’thas. We were proud when we downed Illidan. We were proud when we downed Kil’jaeden. I don’t see why we can’t be proud for killing more bosses in less time than the guild who has previously always been ahead of us.

I mean another week and their five day schedule will have them right back in front. They’ll get credit for Alliance first kills. We’ll continue along with our three day raiding schedule. A little bit of pride never hurt anyone.

OMG ULDUAR!!!

So the patch came out this past Tuesday and the servers didn’t come up until some crazy late time. Despite this we still got a 10-man raid together and went to play in the wonderful new Ulduar.

With those 10 people we engaged Flame Leviathon on 4 Tower Hard Mode, wiped on Ignis trash at least four times, got 20-40k meleed on Ignis, wiped on Razorscale with 30k health left (“He’s not so hard.”), wiped three times to XT-002’s unkillable linked trash, and attempted to kill XT-002 while thinking that any dps on his heart would tigger hard mode. New instances are so much fun.

A few hotfixes and updated strats later it was Thursday night. In we went with specific instructions to not touch anything. Vehicles were assigned, trash was killed, and [Heroic: Shutout] was earned, followed quickly by [Emblem of Conquest] for those of us who didn’t go to the sorry excuse for a loot bag before raid.

Razorscale was next. Had a few wipes on this one because people apparently had forgotten about the “don’t stand in fire” thing during the long trips through Naxxramas. But then we downed her with [Heroic: A Quick Shave] and big smiles on our faces.

XT-002’s trash was removed until they figure out how to make the separate pulls NOT come together. Yay for obscure programming. But without having to work around that trash and knowing that dpsing the heart is VERY important we set in on the robot with that GOD AWFUL voice. “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!” After some horrible attempts and some close attempts everything came together along with [Heroic: Nerf Engineering] AND [Heroic: Nerf Grabity Bombs] (Misspelling intended) on our kill.

The first two bosses were pretty nominal. XT-002 was the boss that took us a better part of the night. As such I fraps the kill and hope to have that vid up by tomorrow. Also, boo on wws for not having it updated for the ulduar bosses yet.

Edit: Vid up: XT-002 Killvid

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I really love Ashley. I guess I really haven’t done much to make her a likable character. Probably no one out there gives a rat’s tail what might happen to her, but I guess I can like her because I know her motivations. Don’t worry, you’ll get to know them too in time. Just try not to hate her too much until that happens.

Cutting it close

So the two 310% speed protos are being taken out of the game in patch 3.1, which by all reasonable belief will hit us April 14. As such this week marks the last lock-out by which the two meta achievements can be gotten. Finally another group was pulled together for this. I think it’s only the second night we even tried it, and we got it on the second try.

Unfortunately, due to a severe lack of care on 10-man achievements, only four people actually got the proto tonight. But at least we got it done with raid the rest of the week and Easter on Sunday.

Now we’ll hold our breaths for the Immortal achievement and see if we get lucky. And if not, we know we’ll hit those achievements in Ulduar hard and get those drakes for everyone in the guild.

Blacksburg Weather

One of the annoying things about the mountains has always been how swiftly the weather can and will change. When SD and I were going to college here we would never go out without a jacket just because it was nice in the morning because it could drop to freezing before class was over.
But we’ve been gone for a few years and were just reminded of the variability of the weather here. Monday was a gorgeous day. We went out to Home Depot to get some paint swatches (and some plants for me) and it was so lovely that we walked down to the Barnes and Noble and back. I sat outside that evening reading one of the new books I got. Tuesday morning I woke up to snow flurries, which continued throughout the day. (Didn’t stick though.)

Night Fell…Hard

Oh. My. Mashed Potatoes and Gravy.

So this was 10 man Sarth with 3 drakes. Should’ve been easier than 25 man which we got months ago. It’s for ‘teh casuals’ after all. But nooooooo. There would be too many adds, or the adds would aggro and kill the healer, or someone would get tail swiped on a void zone, or someone would get dazed while running from a fire wall, or a tank would get double breathed and double meleed at the same time, or the tank would move too far to avoid a fire wall and range his healer, or the dps would miss cutting off the second wave of whelps, or the portal tank would click out of the portal and leave the adds aggroed.

I have never been so frustrated on the vast amount of stupidly annoying random things that could happen to wipe a raid since Archimonde. And that’s saying something. Four full nights we wiped on this stupid fight. But now it’s down. And I’m not going back in until I’m in full T8. (Next week the melee group gets their shot.)

Lessons

I had trouble with this section because there is a fine line when a character goes through lessons in a story. On one hand it’s a fine time to explain the workings of the world through whatever the character happens to be learning, and on the other hand you can end up with an Eragon situation where half of your book is taken up by horribly dull lessons while the brother steals the interest of the reader out on his legendary adventure. >.>

In this case I went for the minamilist approach. As such the section is really short and very little about rithae is explained to the reader. This is mostly because I didn’t want this section to be a horribly long info dump. The information about rithae that I skipped will be explained as Rayne uses it in the next several chapters. (At least that’s the plan.) Hopefully that spreads out the information well. Who knows. I’m making this up as I go…

Young Rayne…

One can only imagine what a nightmare raising Rayne would have been. She was quite the naughty child,  talking back, staying out late, getting in trouble with the law (on the rare occasion she got caught) drinking, doing drugs. Of course her grades were pristine without even trying, so there was only so much complaining her teachers could do.

No surprise she turned into such an adult.