The rest of the story …

This is going to be long, and it’s a busy day at work, but I’ll try to get it all up here. I’ll post in segments, so keep checking back if you want the whole story.

I logged in about 4:30 after the servers took forever to come back online. Why http://worldofwarcraft.com goes down too, I’ll never know. I invited Darias of Serenity, Winslow, Buckeyefan (who later logged in Homerjay), and Tritin.

While waiting for Winslow to log in, I got help from Buckeye and Darias to finish my Obsidian quest by the dying architect. They wouldn’t go down with two of us, to it took until we had all three. After repairing from my 3 deaths, we headed to BRD and just then Winslow logged in. He had a VERY good excuse, though. The server time is different for him. It was no problem for me, really, because I got that quest done.

When we got to the highway, chaos ensued…

Through no fault of his own, Darias’ UI was messing up on him. I almost died in our first pull, so we stopped to let him sort it out. Then we pulled the first group of troops to the left on the highway and got gang-killed by the patrol that we didn’t notice. Wipe #1. We tried again. Using Mind Control to kill the medic, we got the patrol. Then we got the original group. Going across the highway, which come to think of it, why???, we pulled them back to the slope and had Wipe #2. Winslow disconnected. Great. No dps. We put out calls for more people for 10 minutes. Then we got Lemelin to join for mage dps. Cool, but what do we do if Winslow gets back on? We were trying a couple of quests before attunement, so we needed to stay a 5-man. No sooner than Lemelin coming up and /waving, Winslow got back on.

Now, as group leader I had to figure out what to do. Lemelin just spent 10 minutes getting to us, but Winslow was there first. I /w him and asked if it was OK to invite him into a raid after we finished the quests? He was fine with that. After another minute of discussion, we decided that we should just zerg the place and be done with it. So I converted to raid and Buckeyefan brought on his 54 warlock. Right. Agg monkey. So with a warrior, mage, priest, warlock, rogue, and paladin, we made our way toward Incendius for what Lemelin called “lava hopping.”

It felt totally out of control, and not very fast, either. I’m pretty sure we made it to Incendius without another wipe. We beat him down and started the dying. Over and over and over again …

After we made the first hop to the wall and walked around the corner to do the first island hop, we stopped and Lemelin briefed everyone on how to get to the island and to land on the tip of it where he was. Bubble up, hop, skip, and jump. Great. Tritin next. Good. Gitr. Hop, skip, jump, jump. GAH!! One jump too many. I pulled a fire guardian. We all died on the island and Darias had to rez us. As soon as Homerjay was rezzed, his agg butt drew another guardian. We wiped. Wipe #3. Darias asked me to invite a 60 druid from Serenity. As we all came back, we were ready for combat when we rezzed Homerjay.

We all made it to the wall and got ready for the long trip to the next island with 5 guardians. The first 2 made it just fine. On my way over as #3, I drew a guardian in the lava who was on patrol down below. I barely made it to the island, and we had to beat him down 3-man. Good job done. Everyone else made it over without incident and Homerjay didn’t draw aggro when he landed. Now it was time to do things properly. These guys were 56-58 elites and we’d have to take then 2 at a time.

The plan was to banish one and fight the other. Since the whole run had gone quite crappy and I was never able to keep aggro in zerg mode, I hadn’t noticed a neat feature of my new talent I got at 56. Nearly unlimited rage while dual-wielding big guys. I got Unbridled Wrath 1/5. It says “gives you and 8% change to generate an additional Rage point when you deal damage with a melee weapon.” Now, I’m not sure if that’s per strike or per damage point or what, but I do know that starting on that island with dual-wielding in defensive stance (10% damage cut) I never ran out of rage. It was Sunder Armor 3-4 times, a couple of Revenges, Heroic Strike and get in another Sunder Armor for the last nuke. It was amazing. No problems on the island. We summoned the druid and hopped over for the last span to the end.

They told me I’d have to pull and take on 2 at a time without loosing aggro. Cool. Once again, no shortage of rage. I had 4 SAs on each of them and was beginning to beat the tar out of them. At one point I had, in defensive stance, a Heroic Strike crit for 1647 damage. That has never happened before! It was incredible. Those guys all fell in like fashion until …

As I ran into the instance, just because I could, I saw on guild chat the funniest thing in days:

I thought about testing the waters and seeing how fast those two guys could beat me to a pulp, but I decided my repair bill was going to be high enough, and it was:

One of the cool things I did while waiting for the servers to come up was getting some UIs that were highly recommended on Pathos Hammer’s guild forums, which are linked on the right. They were touted as good UIs for warriors. I got Item Rack, Scrolling Combat Text, and Tipbuddy. I love them all. Item Rack lets me change sets with key bindings or by selecting an item on a bar and selecting something else in my bags that can go in that slot. I was switching between dual-wield and shield-up sets in a half-second without fumbling around in my bags. I also set up a set for my polearm, but didn’t use that last night. The combat text is cool because it says when I’m healed, when I can Revenge, Overpower, etc. Tipbuddy is cool because it gives you a lot of info with a hover-over:

Then it was free summoning for attunement. I was off for Silithus to complete a delivery quest and I logged and processed all of these wonderful pics. I’ll see you in MC at 60.