Monday (7 Jun) - Nothing to do Day

Monday (7 Jun) - Nothing to do Day

At least nothing to do on a maintenance day that is scheduled to last until midnight and probably later.

But there is Monday night to talk about, of course. Ando, Lao, and EZ showed up for pvp night. Ando was level 40 already, and Lao DINGED to level 40 earlier in the day. EZ had worked hard to get from level 32 to level 35, but that still wouldn't get her into the 40-49 pvp bracket. So level 42 Mery got a rare chance to come out and play. That chance was so rare it was almost like learning how to play again. "Let's see," Mery joked, "I'm a hunter, right? I should have, like, some kind of combat pet. Anyone remember where I left mine?"

Lao and Mery got in on a battleground while waiting on Ando, and then the three of them mixed it up in a second match. Both were somewhat forgettable matches with not much pizzazz on the part of either faction, it seemed. Perhaps knowing that the servers were going to go down dampened spirits.

Unhappy with the desultory results from the battlegrounds, we decided to try a random dungeon. Ando signed on as the healer with Lao and Mery the DPS. We picked up a paladin tank and a shaman ranged DPS, and learned that we were headed into Uldaman. It's a level 39-47 dungeon, right in our wheelhouse. With such a wide level range of the elite mobs in Uldaman, it was a bit hard to judge how hard to DPS and how fast to move. There are a lot of mobs in Uldaman, too, so every fight would entail three or more mobs. The paladin tank started out cautiously, perhaps a little too cautiously for our group. Uldaman is huge, and could take hours to do everything. Ando (healing) and the tank agreed that we could move faster, but even then Ando decided to help out by aggroing additional mobs to kite over to the tank. Mery used her multi-shot as often as she could to nail multiple mobs, and helping pull aggroed mobs off of Lao or Ando when necessary. Some of those pulls were huge, and sometimes Lao or the shaman would die. The tank even died on one large grouping, and Ando died once (or was it twice, Ando?) when the endangered paladin Bubbled, dropping aggro and sending all those mobs at Ando. Mery often had mobs in her face, but with the help of Sassy, her tanking gorilla, Mery managed to stay alive throughout the dungeon.

When we finished Uldaman, Lao had to call it an evening and Mery and Ando hung out in Uldaman a bit longer, poking our noses into areas we didn't get to in our quick step march with the group. When that paled it was time to bring out the bigger guns.

Sin, the level 77/78 moonkin/healer druid and shadowpriest Philly hooked up for another random normal dungeon. I think it was Gundrak, but it's hard to remember after having done so many. Philly, at level 80, had the advantage over the other DPS and figured she might have to tone down her attacks depending on how well geared and experienced the tank was.

It didn't start out so well. A small pull turned into a large pull the tank didn't pick up and a small army charged right at Philly. Sin, doing the healing, had no time to react before Philly went down. I was so surprised Philly was dead before I was able to reach for the Shield. The tank acknowledged that he had goofed, and after that things went more or less according to plan. We got a little lost at one point, although Philly couldn't be sure because she's more or less permanently lost in dungeons anyway.

We signed up for another random dungeon, and while we waited went off to kill a level 75 elite for a quest Sin was on. We never did get that second random dungeon. Right on time, we got a server message counting down the minutes until the server would go down.

See ya'll on the other side of maintenance.