I love gryffins, and I always have them in some way, shape, or form, in every story I write. In this story they’re a rather important part, seeing as how the gryffin of the Founding King is on the country’s flag. They’ll be more on gryffin knights later.
Illusion Shattered
So we downed our first hard mode in 25-man. Took us a while, about on par with how long it took to learn the harder bosses pre-LK. I’m actually quite thrilled about it, all things considered. Blizzard came up with a decent way to allow casuals (10-man normal), semi-casuals (10-man hard or 25-man normal), and hard core raiders (25-man hard) to all see the content and get the desired challenge out of the game.
Once we figured out what strat to use on Thorim it all worked out pretty well. I actually like seeing how ‘sloppily’ we play on normal modes (Mostly because that’s good enough to down a boss.) and then watch as we tighten up our strat and our play in order to down the hard mode. Normal mode Thorim people could be wherever, most only got out of 50% of the lightning charges and chain lightning got chained around everywhere.
In hard mode, the battle field is pretty much halved by the addition of blizzard and moving becomes all that much harder with the frost effects while the lightning damage becomes unforgiving. The enrage timer itself stops mattering as the dps races to burn down the boss before the tanks are one shot. Fun stuff.
Not much point of a kill shot since it looks no different from one off a normal kill, but then I need something to go on this front page. I added some extras so it won’t be too boring.
And since I’m posting for our latest 25-man victory, I figure I might as well bring you up to speed on the currant achievements for our 10-man group.
With the addition of Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood (which I wasn’t in raid for) we’re looking at only Mimiron keeping us from our date with Algalon. Discouraging wipes only made slightly better knowing that everyone considers hard mode Mimiron the hardest fight. Downing it, even in 10-man, will deserve a front page post.
New toy!
This post is a little less polished this week because I have gotten a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements and I am busy rushing up the learning curve of all Adobe products. (The way you edit text that is already in place is so far from intuative it made me sick.)
As for the story, Shae and Kwen are now in their new home. Or temporary new home. Not quite handmaidens yet.
Yay for family
Having an uncle in town when the inns are full is quite handy. Plus they get to meet the awesome Kelbrand!
Interview
Okay, interview’s over. Now to wait for the results. But what to do in this downtime? You’ll find out next week. Although it’s not too obvious, Garwood Valley is pretty behind in the times. Old traditions such as a woman not touching a man’s hand without a glove is something Shae was taught. It’s become a little dated along with several other things Shae has taken for granted.
Oh the annoyance of gray vs grey. I have decided to go with the former due to my own short research into it. As such, any use to grey is a typo. (My issues when it comes to spelling are so not helped by words that have more than one spelling.) I guess it’s my own fault for making the country’s name Graymane.
Painting Weekend
So that house that SD and I bought. We’ve been living in it for a while now and we decided it was about time to get some paint on the walls. So we had the family come down and we spent the entirety of a Saturday painting most of the rooms in the house.
The great room is hazelnut, a light tan color that I couldn’t even see until it’d spent a day drying.
The downstairs bathroom is Soft Iris, a lovely light lavender.
Our bedroom is Scotland Isle, a nice mossy green color.
The master bath is a nice light blue.
The other upstairs bathroom is a vibrant dark blue.
SD’s office is half navy blue with an extra stripe.
My father was also able to run an extra ethernet cable up to the greatroom so both SD and I could connect through a wall socket. He also cut a bit out of the washer/dryer door so the dryer door could swing open without hitting the door frame.
It was a very productive and fun weekend. I want my next project to be finishing the basement, but that’s kind of a big job, so I’m not sure if I’ll do that next. Maybe putting up that tile backsplash in the kitchen.
Tentacle Monster Down
I want to write: Ulduar Clear! but we all know it isn’t true. Even if you ignore the fact that we know Algalon still lurks, it won’t really be clear until we’ve finished all the hard-modes including the ones we’ll likely skip in order to get to Algalon faster.
That being said~Yogg-saron has been defeated. It was a pretty clean kill. P1 went smoothly, as has been happening more and more consistently. P2 the dispels were quick the dps was pro both inside and outside. Everyone kept their sanity and the last crusher died just as Yogg’s brain was taken to 30%.
I’d only been to p3 twice before this having missed a night of progression, but we all gathered where we were supposed to. Melee did their job, ranged did their circles, healers kept their backs to us. Such a nice, easy phase.
Though for some reason Yogg died at ~800k health, or at least that’s when the raid started getting their achievements. Not sure what was up with that. Can’t complain. We would’ve killed him anyway. What’s 800k health for an Old God anyway?
New story start
Updating twice a week was too much stress. It really made me appreciate (and marvel at) those webcomic authors who update twice or even three times a week. While they don’t have to have quite as much story planned out for each update, the drawing and coloring is a lot of work.
I am pretty excited about this story and I’m hoping that I do it justice.
And back
So I did a lot of work in the weeks I was gone. Two new books on writing and characters sent me into detail mania, but not on Silent Wings, but another story that I had been thinking a lot about called Candidate.
I fleshed out all of the main characters, figured out more backstory that gave more solid motivations, actually planned out the plot (!!! i no rite?) and I started writing again.
The other thing that I did was one of the main issues I had with posting things on this site, and that was my opinion that everything had to be perfect when I put it up here. Well I don’t ever think anything is perfect, and if I kept trying to do this I would simply drive myself mad.
I have to remember that this site exists for me and not you. As much as I love feedback and people reading my stories, this site exists to help me as a writer.
Therefore expecting what I post here to be publishable quality is hogswash. Therefore the new banner I’m working on clearly displays that this is a First Draft.
Now that doesn’t mean what I post will be trash. I will check my spelling and my grammar. I have the characters planned along with the plot (In 10 easy steps!) but at the same time I’m not going to slave over getting the dialogue exactly right. I might gloss over some descriptions, I might leave details to be added later, that sort of thing.
Pretty much it will be like I have been writing, only I’m clearly saying that I know it’s not perfect and I’m okay with that.
That being said, I’ll be posting the first section tomorrow. I will then be updating with one section every week on Tuesday, (WoW is down for matienance, so I figure it’s the best day to update.) with some things like character bios and world details thrown in on off-days if I’m so inclined.
And now that I’ve probably scared away anyone who bothered to visit this site in the first place…I have writing to do.
Plants
On my deck I currently have two pots of bush beans, one with a blueberry bush, and one with canolope. We’ll see how well these things do in pots. (large pots, but pots non-the-less)
