The Joy

I have times when I really don’t enjoy playing Warcraft. Usually this is sometimes around the end of the summer. It tends to be quiet online, raids are hard to fill up, the auction house looks like a flea market. At those times I log on, stand around in Dalaran for a while, realize I don’t feel like dailies, running dungeons or PvP and just log back out. I felt like this just a few weeks ago.

Well, summer is over and I’m really enjoying Warcraft. I’m leveling a Shaman alt, now 62, which is highly enjoyable as elemental really comes into it’s own in Outland, mainly thanks to gear. Raids are back to full and progressing. Our hard mode team is back in swing and attacking Ulduar 10. Last Monday we cleared Thorim hard mode, which went faster than some of our normal kills, this also got our guy-on-the-Algalon-key-quest the item he needed from Thorim. We Absolutely nuked down Hodir hard mode (yours truly delivering nearly 8k dps… in offspec!) We had to get past Mimiron so no hard mode there but our kill on normal really showed our progress, there were quite a few deaths, it had been a while since we had done Mimiron, yet we cleared the encounter quite comfortably. We also tried some tactics that should help us when we do start trying this on hard, just taunting the bomb bots and eating the damage instead of controlling it and a good tank switch tactic on the Plasma blasts in fase 1.

Then we threw ourselves at General Vezax. We don’t have a lot of experience with Vezax, we’ve only killed 3 or 4 times. This time we tried for the hard mode. We had many attempts but were not able to down him and the Saronite Animus. We did however learn a lot about how people should be positioned, the use of tanking cooldowns, kiting strategy etc. The evening was a display of progress each attempt being better than the last, getting as close as 20% left on both Vezax and the Animus. It’s seeing everyone hard work and effort slowly, but surely, paying off that is so enjoyable.

Last night we cleared Onyxia 25. She was kind enough to drop our first 25 version of Quel’serrar, which went to our warrior tank. Then we headed for ToC 25. On Anub’arak last phase we just let the burrowers go underground. As I was tanking the boss I could see and offtank with 1 burrower move about but it would not burrow. He moved again, still not. Then I hear him on voicechat “Mine doesn’t want to burrow” he sounded so sad. It made me laugh so much, it was worth raiding the entire evening just for that moment. We’ve got our Anub strategy down now, this was our third kill on 25, so I think we can call it farm!

I love this game!