Finally we got our act together and got our butts into an instance and, gotta say it, it was like old times!

We decided to challenge The Nexus as we had folks closer to that Instance. At first we thought we'd have to find a tank as usual, but Ralph wanted to bring his Deathknight so we decided to let him tank (Saints preserve us) and on the whole, it came out rather well! I think B has found a new role in the group. Time to spec frost B! ;-) That meant that Howie could come along as DPS.

Getting to the Nexus is ALWAYS an adventure as there are both level 72 and level 80 instances in the keep so you can frequently find Horde of both levels by the summoning stone. When we arrived there was a group of 70's Horde summoning. We figured with an 80 warrior with us, they wouldn't attack, especially if we were able to summon the whole party quickly. That went downhill rapidly when some 80 Horde showed up. We quickly found ourselves dead. We ran back and found the 80's had left. So we rezzed up and put the shoe on the other foot and the Horde was soon dead. We ran in and started the instance.

Clearing the trash around the bosses went pretty smoothly with only one incident where we were unable to keep Jon's bloodlust in check. The little flower things were sure annoying, but aside of that things went well. There were a few times though when we pulled an extra group or a PAT arrived that we barely squeaked through.

Then it was on to the bosses. We faced Grand Magus Telestra, Ormork the Tree Shaper and Anomalus in order. Each went down without a wipe (although we did lose players from time to time). Telestra went well with the group wiping out here adds quickly. With Ormork, everyone found out not to stand over the spikes reallllllly quickly. Even Anomalus went down in order.

Then we got to the final boss Keristraza and it was a whole different story. She has a nasty debuff that when it stacks delivers heavy damage. The only way out is to move. Not too tough for the tank and melee DPS (although they have to worry about the breath weapon and the tail swipe). It is however quite a puzzle for the casters and especially the healer. Our first try got her down to 10% and things looked good. However six tries later things were getting WORSE! We switched healers and let the druid give it a try with his HOTs. That was better, but we still wiped. On the final try we got it right with Mike healing and me switching between healing and DPS and dropping my fire elemental and using our PvP trinkets to get out of the ice prisons.

Time to turn in our quests and go home! Just like old times!

Then we had a last bit of fun. Wingnuttage had pulled Roqo to Dalaran using the BG summon method. Roqo had then summoned Dragon and Lobster the next day. So Lobster was going to summon Roqb. I logged onto Dreala so she could get into it. A quick loosing effort in AB later and we were in Dalaran!

Since I was on D, I decided to do a quest or two and I had another one of those hair raising moments! Back to the Westgarde keep area, where you get a quest to go to a cave in a Scarlet Enclave fortress. I snuck in there, dispatched the MOBs guarding the place and clicked the orb. All along I was thinking, "Something is familiar about this place." The orb summoned the shades of Arthas and Bronzebeard. THIS IS WHERE ARTHAS GOT FROSTMOURNE!!!!!!!!!! The shades go through the whole taking of Frostmourne theater and you watch Arthas fall to evil. It's heartbreaking and it made my hair stand up watching it. I snuck out and it was time to log and head for bed.

I know these are just games we are playing, but there have been a couple of times during my gaming experience where I've just been stopped in my tracks as if someone punched me in the gut. The first time was in Diablo II when you return to the village of Tristram and find it burned to the ground and everyone dead. Despite the fact that they were just pixels on a screen, after spending the entire first Diablo game interacting with these "people", it felt almost as if it was a real town and these were real friends that I found dead. I was so looking forward to seeing everyone again in the new game that I was just devastated. I was so mad, that I spent the next half of an hour just killing EVERYTHING that moved in the town. I cleared out every undead and boss.

I had another experience like that last night. I was running the quests in Dragonblight and when you get to Eastern DB and start doing the Wintergarde Keep quests, you eventually are sent to see a Paladin outside the walls. He sends you to discover the Forgotten Strand slightly Southwest on the coast. It's a ruined town next to a harbor of sunken ships that is populated with ghosts of Alliance Knights, Footmen, Riflemen and Peasants. In your first quest there, you are sent into the spirit world to talk to them. As you do, you find out that they are waiting for Prince Arthas to return so they can go home as the King has recalled their army. Then all of a sudden you realize OMG THIS IS WHERE IT ALL HAPPENED!!!!!!!!

First a bit of history: if you played the original Warcraft games you've seen this place before. In Warcraft III Arthas and his forces land here in pursuit of the lich Mal'ganis who spread the Scourge Plague through Loraderon. Unwilling to return when commanded by his father the King, Arthas recruits Troll mercenaries to burn the ships thus trapping his forces in Northrend so he can continue to pursue the Scourge. He then turns on the mercenaries, telling his men that they burned the ships and commanding that they be killed. Technically true, but highly dishonorable. It's his first steps down the road of evil that eventually lead to him becoming the Lich King.

As I said, as you talk to the ghostly inhabitants of the village, you come to realize where you are and I'm not kidding, hairs stood up on the back of my neck! It was one thing to have the little icons in WCIII running around in 2D, but to return and in full 3D to find yourself in the middle of it was something else entirely! It made the tragedy which had only been a scenario you had to solve in WCIII seem all of a sudden very real. This was especially true when you finish your last quest there. You kick off a bit of theater where the ghosts act out these scenes for you in a ghostly echo of the past. I highly recommend sticking around for it!

Hey All,

When I arrived home, I put the DVD in and got a window saying that my machine didn't meet the minimum requirements! I had seen that you needed at least a gig of ram and 15 gigs on the hard drive, so I had upgraded the old Mac to 1.5 gigs and cleaned off the hard drive which was stupid as it only needed a few gigs of space (I guess 15 is for a brand new install). What I didn't see previously was that you needed a G5 1.6GHz processor. Well, I have two 1 GHz G4's in there so I prayed that that would be enough. The Blizz website said that other machines could run it, they just couldn't guarantee it.

I loaded the game but patching require more time than I had before Cub Scouts. So I had to finish
afterwards. The load screen is COOL! Tells the whole saga of Arthas (if you weren't around for Warcraft I II and III). That was a nice touch.

After patching (3.0.2 and 3.0.3 again)I clicked run and prayed. It started! I ran Roqo over to the dock and hopped the boat to Northrend. Success! In fact, despite the dire warnings, my old Mac isn't having any problems at all. I hopped off trained up (which took all my money) and set my stone in the Inn.  Blizz seemed to have learned from the previous expansion by giving you a ton of new recipies for each profession so if you aren't maxed out you can catch up quickly.  Much better than last time where you had only a few options that didn't require mats from the end game raids to level.

My plan is to only run Roqo with the group exclusively so I logged into Dreala. She was still in Shatt, so I headed for IF, hopped the Griff to Menethil and took the boat to the other starting area in Howling Fjord.  I'm sure we'll adventure in both areas, but first impressions, Howling Fjord is a lot cooler in it's appearance. Just the boat ride in is worth it!

First Impressions: Really cool. As different from Outland as Outland was from the Old World. Everything is BIG. Big monsters, big buildings, big trouble!  Horde everwhere, gotta watch your back. We got into a pack of them a couple of times and got ganked. We ganked back a few times to even it up. The terrain is fantastic. It's old world feel, but at the same time different from what we've seen. New monsters, old monsters. Everyone in Ninja'ing your nodes. I don't know how I'm ever going to level my skills! Can't get mats.

A couple more things. Most quests give you 5-10G not bad, almost on par with dailies. Also most give 20K XP which is nice since you need like 1.5 Million for 71. I noticed that you weren't hand held like you were in BC where you had an exact script of quests for your first couple of days of adventuring. It's more free form like entering a new zone in the old world. Also Blizz has fixed an oversight from the last expansion. You don't have any saved up rest for your characters. With Dreala, I always logged out in an Inn and as a consequence, when BC came out, she never ran out of rested XP all the way to 70. Both Roqo and D had about 5 rested bubbles when they arrived in Outland.

Other things.  Respawn rate is huge right now.  It's not unusual to Kill a MOB and have it respawn right on you!  Also Blizz didn't seem to learn from their earlier incarnations in the questing.  You still have to reenter things a LOT.  Go to the quarry and kill 12 things.  Go back and read 4 things.  Go back and kill 4 more things and free others.  Go back and gather 10 things...  Hopefully it won't be too bad in future zones. Also the item evolution continues.  The old world had elemental earth, BC had primal earth, Wrath has eternal earth (and so forth).  While we are talking about items, Dreala who is in all blues and greens has been replacing items right away.  Roqo in Epics has found that things in the starting area are at least a step below what he has.  

Last Thing. Howie had the best line of the first night, "We're all Noobs again." True true.

We took a little time out this week for a bit of seasonal fun and we challenged the Headless Horseman in the Scarlet Monestary graveyard.  It was a good bit of fun! 

The fight is pretty straight forward.  There are three phases.  The first is just a Tank and Spank.  Then the Horseman flings off his head and heals while you DPS the head.  That can be trouble as you have to pick up this tiny head zipping around the grounds.  The second phase is the same with the addition that the horseman flings flaming pumpkins that stun you and take about half of your hitpoints in 10 seconds.  That got interesting when the healer got hit but we never really were in any danger.  Then the roaming head routine again between phases.  The third phase is the same as the first with 4 adds summoned part way through.  Our DPS was so high that the adds only appeared twice all night and weren't an issue as the fight was over moments later both times.  Having Fevh and Sap along helped there. 

We each summoned the Horseman and a couple had two summons so we downed him a total of 7 times.  We got 5 of the spellpower rings, 2 of the attack power and two brooms.  Too bad no learing skull helms or (the ultimate prize) Reigns of the horsemans charger.  Maybe next week.  

While we were there, we all took advantage of the copius tricky treats that dropped and ate till we puked (for an achivement).  Also I got a bunch of weighted jack-o-lanterns and when I got back to Shatt I tried to complete the achievement for putting a pumpkin head on each of the races.  There was no problem getting BE's or Tauren and Night Elves were plentifull too.  Luckily, I found a Dwarf, Gnome, Troll and Undead right away too.  After a few minutes I found a human and an Orc which just left a Dranai to find.  Where could I find a Dranai?  Where?  Oh hey!  I'm a Dranai!  So I pumpkined myself and completed the achievement.

Afterwards we switched to alts and got all the 40's up a level in STV.  

Tonight we attacked the Sethekk Halls with one mission in mind - Get Mike his Epic Flight Form!

On the way we ended up accomplishing a lot more missions. Patch 3.0.2 came out earlier in the week and with it a bundle of trouble. This patch was the prelim for next month's release of the game expansion. This means that (just like in the last expansion) it took a Mix-Master to the code behind the game. A lot of things changed (mostly for the better). Almost everyone said the same thing. They logged in on Tuesday and between the server crashes, spent the next hour just trying to get things working as they wanted. The one phrase most heard last night was, "This is like a whole new game!" That was the biggest mission of the night, just try to learn to run your character again. This was especially true for Roqo and Dragon as they swapped healing and DPS roles for this run and for Freedom as he was learning how to use his new devilsaur pet (love the new thunder lizard). It was fun despite the occasional mass screw ups. :)

Things started well with the group assembling in good order and we only had a small pause while Jon got his Heroic Key, then it was in the door. Heroic mode is definitely more difficult than the regular setting, but our generally over geared status made it more on par. We marched through the instance and had only a couple of really bad pulls. One ended up in a wipe when we were feared and pulled multiple groups at once. The other time a bad pull brought the whole house on us. That time Kurg held them long enough to give us a head start and we were able to combine the effects of Earthbind totems and our own two feet to get us out of there. That led to a hilarious series of event as we entered the instance multiple times only to find that the MOBs hadn't reset and were waiting just inside the door for us (run away, run away).

That isn't to say we didn't lose people along the way, after all it was a Heroic instance. If you pull agro in a heroic, you will quickly be in a world of hurt if the tank can't get him back and that happened to us from time to time. One exceptional time we lost Roqbottom, Freedomroq and Dragonroq which meant that we were now missing our best DPS AND our healer! I went over 100% to healing and kept Kurgan up till the (already heavily damaged) mobs were down. Let's hear it for off-healing hybrids!

Sethekk Halls has two bosses unless you are there to summon the third for the Epic Flight Quest. We chewed the first one up with only a bit of concern. He summons elementals at three points in the fight and you have to take them down or lose. I'm not going to say we did a great job there, but we did a good enough job to get out without any casualties. Everyone complimented Mike on his excellent healing.

Then we had to face Anzu to get Mike's flight form. He stuns you, cyclones you, spell bombs you and summons birds to harass you. On the plus side, there are three bird statues around the room that if you hit them with a HOT spell (it is a Druid quest) come to life and buff the party. Since no one in the party had faced Anzu before, we were more concerned about this quest than any of the others, but everyone did their job and we downed Anzu in one try! Happy Flight Form Mike!

Then it was on to Talon King Ikiss. He was optional as Anzu was the real reason we were there, but since Ikiss was just one room away, what the heck! We cleared to him and gave it a try. Ikiss has one realllllllllllllllly nasty attack (in a deck of cards that includes AOE shadow bots and plymorphs) he blinks and then channels a HUGE arcane blast. If you don't have 8K or more HP, you're dead and if you do, you're probably dead when the follow-up shadow bolts hit you. The only chance you have is to run behind the columns when he channels the spell and hide there from the blast.

Then afterward, aggro is an issue for the tanks and line of site for the healers and casters. In fact the first time we faced him (long ago), we almost gave up. We were spread out over the room and when he blinked, even if we got behind a pillar, we couldn't get back in LOS soon enough and we all died quickly. Some quick interenet research showed that you have to stay in a group by one of the pillars to keep Ikiss in one spot when he blinks, making it easy to get to a pillar to hide and reestablish aggro/LOS after a blast.

This time armed with this knowledge we all charged in, scattered and died. :( The second time though, we did things correctly and prevailed! It was all worth it too, Ikiss dropped a veritable garage sale! Almost everyone got something.

Then it was home and bed and a job well done.

Oh yea, the snarky comments were fun too!

In preparation for next week's Heroic Seth run to get Mikes Swift Flight form, we needed to make sure that RoqBottom had the neccessary rep to get the Heroic Key.  That required that we run her up from 2400 rep to 6000 in one night. 

Impossible you say?

Not for the Roqband!

The Heroic Key for Seth is handed out by the Lower City faction so we needed to up Jon's LC rep.  Most of the quests that do so are in and around Terrokar Forest.  Allerian Stronghold, The Caravan, The Sha'tari Outpost and of course Lower City in Shatt.  So we loaded RoqB up with every quest she could hold and started out.  

Things went rather quickly (as you can imagine) as we had 4 people working on the same quest with only one and some times two people benefitting.  We ground through quest after quest and even found a few that hadn't been done by the anyone in the group.  Along the way ran into several Horde (much to their detriment).  The best two were a 64 Shammy and a 70 Mage.  We ran across the poor Shammy about a dozen times as we went back and forth across the zones and got him each time.  He must have been pretty sick of seeing us by the time the night was done.  The mage was another story though.  He was ambushing us from behind when we were engaged with another group.  When we figured out what was happening, we turned on him and he fled.  We followed and when he landed (near by Terrorantula of all places) we got him.  He rezzed and went invisible.  Thinking we had lost him we searched the area and found his body behind the giant spider!  Apparently the invisibility didn't work on the spider and Terrorantula took him out.  With the mage's body perched under the tarantulas butt in a box canyon with no way out, we figured there wasn't anything we could do to make his situation worse, so we left.  

When all was said and done, we raised RoqB's rep by a whopping 4000 points in one day!  Not too bad and a good bit of fun too!  

See you in Sethhek next week!