OK, the Black Knight can be quite tough

Logged on last night and asked around if anyone needed a healer. A guild group had just lost their (non-guild) paladin healer in ToC, with just the Black Knight to go, so I offered to fill the spot.

In a PUG you'd ask more questions (like, just why did your healer quit on the last boss), but it was a guild group so in I went.

It turns out that an undergeared tank (by which I mean only about 40% epics, the remainder being good blues) is really hard to keep alive on the Black Knight. And forget him tanking the ghouls as well in phase 2, so the healer will end up aggroing them.

Being a guild group we persevered and defeated him in the end, but it took proper effort and tactics, an over-geared AoE healer and probably a bit of luck.

Facerolling our way to...

Upgrades? Boredom?

Since the patch hit it seems that everyone is farming heroics for badges, not surprisingly. However, in a group of Naxx-25 / Ulduar-10 geared players none of the heroics - even the new Trial of Champions instance - present much of a challenge. So although I'll undoubtedly be running heroics for a good few weeks, I'm not actually having much fun in WoW at the moment.

Roll on the end of the holiday season, when guild raids will start again in earnest.

Dragon rider

Last night I finally achieved one of my long term goals of Wrath and bought myself the Wyrmrest red dragon.

Unfortunately, like a lot of these longer term, slowly achievable goals (reaching level 70 and gaining my epic flyer spring to mind as comparisons) it felt somewhat underwhelming. I'm obviously not quite the right mindset for this part of the game, although long term I'm sure I'll be happier riding a dragon than my faithful windrider.

Now, when's the next guild first boss kill going to be?

Raiding update - Mimiron

After my sight-seeing trip a few weeks ago I was able to see Mimiron in action last night. Of the 10 raiders present myself and 2 others were new to the fight, so killing him on the 6th attempt was a pretty good result I felt, and the shouts on Ventrilo seemed to agree.

It was what you'd call a good wipe night - on each attempt we got a bit further through the phases, looked at our problems, and made different mistakes the next time. It was much more "we'll get him, but maybe not tonight" rather than "wtf, this guy's impossible!".

Llyra's boss guide gave me in invaluable head start on the fight. But even more valuable and impressive was our raid leader and main tank acting as a sort of live Boss Mods: "'Random DPS' - move - Rocket!". Without him I'm sure it'd have taken us rather longer.

I'm also increasingly thinking that Blizzard has got their raid design really right at the moment. We're a strange mix of casual and progression-orientated guild, and we're moving in to the last few bosses that are currently available. Meanwhile the properly progression-orientated guilds are aiming for world- and server-firsts of the various hard modes. They may be an artificial hoop, but people are jumping through them.

It sort of feels like there should be another raid out there, like in Burning Crusade where Black Temple and then Sunwell felt like a proper peak to be climbed. However, if there were further raids in Wrath at the moment would anyone do the Ulduar hard modes? And without the hard modes would Ulduar be decried as "too easy"?

Argent Tournament? Chicken riding?!

I went to check out the Argent Tournament, something I've been meaning to do for a while. Picked up a few minor quests, and then went to find out about the tournament itself. It turns out they want me to ride a chicken hawkstrider chicken into combat. So much for that.

I might do the goblin dailies, and it looks pretty cool when I'm riding my Wolf around Dalaran with the tournament lance equipped. But the tournament itself will remain a closed book, at least for this Orc.

Ulduar progress

I've now progressed pretty far in Ulduar with my guild, and we're hopefully not far off a full clear. Given we raid sort of casually, with only 2 days per week in the instance, I think we're doing pretty well.

This last week on night one we downed Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002, Kologarn, Auriaya, Thorim and the Assembly of Iron, one-shotting them all except for Thorim which took us 6 attempts.

Then last night we killed Freya (3rd attempt) and Hodir (5 attempts or so).

The bosses we're wiping on now, especially Thorim and Hodir, are problematic in that one serious mistake from one raider will cause a wipe. We're not carrying any fools though so before too long I'm sure we'll be one- or two-shotting them. Time will tell...

A bonus moment from last night was that, once the raid had been called for the night, I was able from Freya's room to chain Far Sight to peak at Mimiron. I forget sometimes when looking enviously at other classes all the cool tricks that shamans have.

Tank switching

It occured to me that Grulgok the orc (although suitably beefy compared to a Forsaken) doesn't really offer much (if anything) storywise that Grulnak doesn't already provide. So I've switched back to Shank as my tank. One downside being that he's 7 levels further back than the character he's trying to replace.

In the interests of Real Life I'll probably make him an enchanter / blacksmith and then drop Grulnika my rogue entirely. Levelling blacksmithing without mining will cost a fair bit, but I figure there's some saving from being able to sell my wares either as armour and weapons or as enchanting materials.

I'm back being happy tanking again, after awakening Grulgok from his retirement to tank Nexus for a guild group. We had a single death, a mage that was two-shotted just before we got to Grand Magus Telestra, and while there's definitely scope for improvement it did reassure me that it's not always the tank's fault when PUGs go bad...