coughRahuulcough 
ZUUL, MOTHAFUCKA, ZUUL!
I’m sure the burn-out-edness will pass in time. Part of it is Big Life-Changing Stress, which should hopefully be clearing up this weekend. I’ll probably be a minimal presence on WoW this week, and once things clear up I should be ready to play again.
I hate Big Life-Changing Stress. All I want to do is play my games. 
Another frustrating night with the random dungeon finder, this time on my pally specced as Holy.
First instance we die twice at the first set of mobs, I pulled aggro after about my second heal. Tank can’t keep threat (pally) so a quick inspect and notice he does not have Improved Righteous Fury and about half his points in the ret tree. I apologise and leave the group, not a good idea for my first healing attempt.
Queue again and I get The Nexus which is lucky as I have a couple of quests for there, 2 Death Knights, a Rogue and Warrior this time. It’s going very well and I am getting into Healing and we make it to the first boss without an issue. During the boss fight (can’t remember the name but he picks us all up and throws us about at one point, that was a surprise) it was close but I kept everyone alive and at the end the rogue called me an ‘awesome healer’ (I have a screenshot that I’ll treasure until the end of my days I’m sure….) and I’m starting to feel very good about it all. We move on to the next pack of mobs and instead of waiting for the tank one of the Death Knights starts the pull. Tank drops group immediately, we all die. Arrrgghhhhhh just as I was getting into the swing of it too. As we wait for another tank people drop out of the group one by one very annoying as I didn’t have time to start all over.
It hasn’t put me off. Yet.
Sorry Jay!
martu, good on you for working on your healing. It’s the role I enjoy most. For that Nexus fight, it helps to have a lot of instant-cast spells to use while she’s tossing you around. Sounds like you were doing well; too bad the tank bailed.
Flightlessbird and I joined a pug for the weekly raid quest in Naxx, which was the first time I’ve been able to get in a group for the weekly. It took about 30 minutes to get the 10-man group together and less than 10 minutes to get to the boss we needed to kill and take him down. We also did a mostly-guild group random, which turned out to be Drak’Tharon Keep! I was shocked because I haven’t been in there in months; it’s never come up as a random.
My 42 lock got put in Mara (Orange) again, which was a bummer because we wiped right before the last boss which means a long corpse run, including the horrible maze of outer Mara. Then once we got inside, people kept getting killed by pats (those lava worms that keep getting spit out). We did finally finish but it took forever.
That was probably my last playtime until at least Friday night, maybe Saturday, since I’ll be out of town. Everyone have a good week!
My guild has really been working at ICC-10 over the last few days; we made a semi-serious effort once before and didn’t down any bosses. Meanwhile, some members have gone on pickup raids and helped in boss kills, so they’ve learned strats.
Saturday night, we’re short one DPS and I don’t want to go, but my husband looks at me with big eyes and I cave. I bring my hunter. 4 or 5 tries on Marrowgar, and finally he goes down. It looks like one big problem was one of our priests, who was almost guaranteed to die first each time, and it seemed like her problem was not moving well/fast/at all during the storm portions. (She’s nice but an airhead and easily distractable, and her comp isn’t the best, so she really needs to pay attention and turn down her graphics settings.) A nice hunter-happy axe is one of the things that drops, but I refuse to roll on it. The way I figure, someone who’s in “I’m not even supposed to be here!” mode isn’t deserving of loot. It went to one of our more full-time hunters, which I am just fine with.
One DPS has to leave, so they decide to replace her and go on, and I say they should replace me too because it’s late. Apparently the next boss, Lady Deathwhisper, is much easier and goes down decently.
Last night, continuation. Once again, I don’t want to go but do, with my hunter.
The rocket packs almost make up for the annoyance of the fight against Deathbringer Saurfang. Almost.
Lots of “trying out” the rocket packs before the battle. 
At one point, I said, “Previous night: progression, two bosses down. Tonight: Rocket packs!” When the guild leader logged in and asked how ICC was going, most of the spontaneous responses were, “Rocket packs!” The ship battle wasn’t too bad, we just had to get our Easily Distractable Teen Boy tank to focus and then we finally did it. (I’m assuming that when Alliance PCs do this, they see the opposite of what we did - for Horde, we’re just minding our own business, cruising off into battle, when the Skybreaker pulls alongside and starts firing on us first.)
Then Saurfang - Horde PCs see a touching encounter where High Overlord Saurfang rebuffs his son’s demand that they join together and both serve the Lich King, by saying that his son died at the Wrathgate; he’s just here to retrieve the body. He also talks about how he had promised his wife that his son would be untainted. Scroll down for the text here.
We just couldn’t make this work. Two hunters to kite the blood beasts, but we didn’t seem to have the DPS to kill them fast enough as the event progressed further. Bad timing, bad things happening. Plus I shouldn’t have been one of the hunters; I don’t really play my hunter that much and someone else could have done the role better.
This exchange is really cool (especially for lore nerds like me) the first time. Maybe even the second. Possibly the third. But by the fourth time (and probably before that), most of the group is going, “All right, already! Where’s the ‘skip the RP and get on with it!’ button?” 
Were you doing things to slow the beasts, rather than just kiting them? Ice traps, roots, knockbacks, Chains of Ice–anything that can slow them down or move them back is helpful here. And everyone should be focusing on killing the same one, rather than splitting your DPS. On 10 man there are only 2, so everyone should be able to reach them without having to get too close to each other.
That takes too GD’d long. We even went and checked both father and son, and there’s no “give us the short form!” option unlike in ToC.
Yeah, we really amped up slowing and all of that after the first failure. Earthbind totems, two frost traps for slowing. We even moved a priest to shadow spec to do more damage.
We’re used to being really casual, and I think it’s just the whole “omg we need to actually pay attention?!” thing that’s hurting us. Not too shabby for our first guild attempt, I think, but it’s just not what I wanted to do last night, and I was not the hunter for the job.
How does it compare to the opening part of Culling of Stratholme?
It’s shorter than that, but unlike CoS, you have to listen to it again every time you retry the boss. :eek:
Wait - you can skip the little CoS play? I don’t think I’ve ever been in a group that’s done that. ToC, sure.
Saurfang? I had the impression that
Alexstrasza and the rest of the red dragonflight showed up in the aftermath of Wrathgate and incinerated all the corpses. They missed Saurfang’s body?
Not yet.
No, you can’t skip the beginning part with Arthas. But if you wipe on one of the bosses, you don’t have to go through the whole RP thing again. You just go back in (it’s still a long run back!) and find the boss wandering around in the town.
Dranosh Saurfang’s soul was consumed by Frostmourne before the dragons arrived. Apparently this allowed the Lich King to reanimate him as a death knight.
It is a somewhat tricky fight technically, but can actually be pretty fun if you have a few ranged DPS good at kiting/slowing/killing. Get a hunter on each side and you can ping-pong them back and forth with Distracting Shot pretty comfortably, especially with some well-placed frost traps.
Also remember to have everybody spread out to minimize the BP he gets from his AoE attack.
That’s not all that’s interesting from that incident at the Wrathgate:
Apparently Bolvar Fordragon was also claimed during that battle, and you hear at the start that he is still being tortured, IIRC in an attempt to turn him. It’s sad that Dranosh Saurfang caved in (first), since he was quite noble and valiant.
Any pallys in that group that cast repentance? That’s good for a minute as long as they aren’t immune.
From the tooltip - “Usable against Demons, Dragonkin, Giants, Humanoids and Undead.” The Blood Beasts seem to be classified as Beasts, even though Hibernate and Scare Beast don’t work on them. I know Turn Undead doesn’t work nor does Hex, Fear, or Polymorph. I’m guessing Repentance doesn’t work either, but I could be wrong.
Thanks for the FoS tips, Shot from Guns.
Geez, how embarrassing. I was playing my lvl 26 prot warrior on Steamwheedle Cartel a bit today and was at the AH looking for a helm. As usual, there was practically nothing available that was wearable at my level, and what was available was ridiculously overpriced. So I griped in guild chat about people on every server who try to jack level ~25 players by grossly overpricing the helms they can wear at that level. And to illustrate my point I linked the lvl 25 gray-text vendor trash helm I was looking at and mentioned the asking price of 5g.
Unfortunately, a lvl 80 guildmate misinterpreted my complaint and apparently thought that I wanted the helm but couldn’t afford it (I could afford it, I was just unwilling to pay that price for a crap vendor-trash helm) and showed up at the AH, bought the helm, and gave it to me. :smack:
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t actually want it, and in any case I guess 5g is nothing to a level 80, so I just said “thanks”. And it’s an extra 146 armor in any case.
If y’all had just said, “Quasi, go into the light!”, I might’ve found it a lot sooner!
J/K!
Q