<Fidelity>

OMG, there’s a giant #@%ing exclamation point! I have a quest… Requiem for a Queen.

Oh no… I’ve fallen down and I can’t get up.

It is super simple, really. Instead of a mechanical monster to kill, it’s a banshee. Only she has a knock back and aggros from about 4325259790 yards away.

I don’t have any explanation for it, but after dealing with the windy bridge for weeks without problem, the sudden appearance of an auto accept “optional” quest made us lose our shit. People were getting flung from the bridge in a fashion that can only be described as willy nilly and accidentally aggroing the banshee, much to the detriment of the guild coffers.

However, we prevailed, and as I managed to catch up on the guild blog I thought we could all look back on this fateful quest and have a good laugh.

He's not getting back up from this one...

What to do when you have the double whammy of being one short, and having to call a raid night early? 9 man some heroic bosses! We are a very small guild, and real life can really get in the way of filling up a raid group, but we roll with the punches and try and get as much done as we can. Sometimes that involves spontaneously finding a guest raider from the wider Dath’remar community. which particularly when attempting progression hardmodes can be a little bit of a lucky dip. We have at times found some great guest raiders, but as any guild does, we have stories about some nightmares too (even though they looked great on paper).

So rather than try and find that special someone, we put our heads down and got to work on a short raid night. First up, heroic Morchok… We decided to go with three healers, since at 15% nerf the enrage timer wasn’t going to be a problem. Since we had only 4 characters on one side, we decided to stack Jondy and Kal healing on one side, with Moordenar soaking. Looking at the healing required after the fight, this was complete overkill in dealing with the extra stomp damage being split between fewer people. On the other side we had Noondez both healing and soaking, resplendent in plate, with shield. One shot.

Next up was heroic Yor’sajh. We figured with the 15% nerf and about 1/6 (or 16.66 (repeating of course)) less DPSers it made sense we should be able to get him down. Yor’sahj turned out to be a relative non-event with a lack mechanics that involved a particular number of characters and we one shot him too.

Heroic Zon’ozz was a different matter. We did manage to have a few pulls on him before we called the raid, but with only 9 characters, split damage mechanics and a little hole in our DPS on adds in the black phase he got away from us. It was a fantastic challenge and great practise as we rocked up to DS and one shot him the following night.

I love pets.  Particularly, I love rare and unique pets.

I also love in game pursuits which require patience and persistence.

So, it was with great sadness and a more than slightly queasy feeling that I dispatched Loque’nahak to complete the Frostbitten achievement in Northrend.  Why, Blizzard, why?

To make amends in some small way for my display of uncharacteristic violence, I am pleased to announce my Loque’nahak Memorial Pet Finding Service for hunters whose paths I’ve crossed or share.

If you have a rare pet you’d like to tame, I am happy to camp it for you!  If you’re not online when it pops, I can provide a reliable spawn time at the very least.  If you are, Have Group, Will Travel means it could be yours!

Our first week in Firelands was an interesting mix of death by Turtle, instance and server restarts, tons of BoEs and patterns and finally Shannox.

The nerfs to trash didn’t go unnoticed, as our first night was a gigantic trash fest, followed by a quick look at Shannox and of course… more trash. Our second night saw a lot more work on Shannox, but instance and server restarts (and of course starting again on trash at the end of the night) disrupted things a little. Finally the last night was a one shot on Shannox followed by a great time learning the Beth’tilac fight.

All in all we had 3 BoE’s on our first night, 1 BoE on the second and finally a surplus hit caster staff on the third. We got a swag of patterns before the drop rate nerf, which will come in handy when the living embers start rolling in.