Monday (17 Oct) - Tea and Crumpets

Monday (17 Oct) - Tea and Crumpets

The weekend was pretty much a wash as far as the Wild family was concerned. There was very little action, and what little there was centered on the Auction House, where prices went through the roof and Happy was deliriously ecstatic.

Sis family members Tea and Congrou had some exciting adventures, though, which I want to share:

"So I have been mucho mucho busy at work, so not many responses or regaling you with tales of late. But due to two awesome moments in pvp, I must take time out and type this before I get to work and bogged down with taxes.
First: Tea’s tale. Wolfturtle, a boomkin in our guild, was a bit bored and Tea decided to join him for pvp. I won’t bore you with the bg’s breakdowns, just the exciting moment. So there we were, in the mist of the Eye. We were holding a steady win, mostly keeping around 2-3 bases and the center. Tea decided to run center since the rest of the team was doing a good job at holding the Horde at bay.
Tea has been dying to get two achievements for Eye. One, capture the flag three times in one game; not sure if no dying is required on this one. Second, capture the flag while we hold four bases. Again, this game was a 2-3 base game the whole time, except for the last minute. FR base gets to neutral, pulling it from the Horde, when Tea grabs the flag. She is running her little gnome legs off. The points are at 20 points to 1600.
DK arm grabs her! Bastard! She ignores him, pops a speed potion. Run little Tea! FR switches over to Alliance control, points hit 1600! GAH! Tea won’t make it! But wait! Eye has a weird bug, even if the points hit the max 1600 it still takes a few seconds longer before the battle actually ends. Me swearing at my computer for Tea to run! Tea runs! Tea hits the flag drop off point, the battle hits the end mark! Alliance wins and Tea gets BOTH her desired achievements!!
Tea is glad she took Turtle’s invite.
Second: Congou’s tale. So I am trolling around herbing and decide to pvp with Congou. Get in an AB, win. Not nothing too exciting there, then she gets into a WSG. Our team was in a very sad state. Three healers on our team and our team is getting eaten and spit up. Bloody orc rogue is two shotting the healers, Congou included, right and left. Horde gets an early cap, and Congou does not have high hopes for a win.
Congou decides to go for the flag. She gets it, even hits the home base tunnel on the final run, no Horde yet holding the Alliance flag. She hits her kitty form and dashes! As soon as she hits the main base room the Horde grab the flag and take off. Our team could not get it back before Congou got killed. So no cap for Congou, but at least they killed them before the Horde hit their base, so no cap for the Horde either.
Whole bunch more of Alliance getting chewed up and spit out occurs. Down to the last five minutes. Congou goes for the flag again. She heals, hits bear form, heals more, gets grabbed by a DKs arm thing, hits kitty, dashes, and CAPS!
“TURTLE!” yells the Alliance. We try but the Horde keep grabbing the flag, but we stop them mid but the last one slips past mid and our forces. “Gah!” We all say, but there is less than a minute left. Will he make it?! Of course he won’t, otherwise I would not mention this tale. Time runs out just as he is about to hit his base. Alliance wins the tie! And I have to point out, if it was not for Ms Congou, it would have never occurred."

On Monday night Wild got into his first raid in ... hmmm, let me look that up ... two weeks. Well, it seems a lot longer than that.

It was the Mon/Tues Firelands raid, and we did, in fact, go to the Firelands. I must admit that for awhile there I thought we were doing a trash run. We didn't seem to be that focused, and wiped twice on trash that had no business killing us. I will admit there were some disconnect problems, and we had to replace DCing raiders twice over the course of the night.

The good news is that eventually we got to face Shannox, the first boss. Wild was healing the tank that would be dealing with the dogs, while Gn, our pally healer, handled the main tank on Shannox. It's been longer than two weeks since Wild had faced Shannox (we'd been attempting Beth'tilac instead). I was astonished at the difference between Wild's last encounter with Shannox and this night. Healing the dog tank was easy. I mean, Wild had time to run back and forth and help heal the tank on Shannox it was so easy. Wild was attacked by the dogs many times, too, and they simply couldn't kill me (that was not the case in previous fights). We had problems because we were careless, stepping into traps, standing in the fire, and not paying attention to who was getting singled out by a dog. I was disappointed with our raid healer, a very well geared shaman who lagged way behind Gn and Wild as raiders died around us while Wild was out of range and Gn was keeping her tank alive.

Despite all that we came very close to killing Shannox. On our best attempt we came within 8% of bringing him down. For the first time our raid actually killed both dogs to get us to that point on several attempts. We should have taken Shannox down. I'll be really disappointed if we don't get it done Tuesday night.

The raid was also an opportunity to compare Wild's healing between his normal Max-ilevel gear setup and his new Max-haste gear setup, which Wild used for the first time Monday night. My overall impression was that total healing was about the same, and Wild had no problems with mana regen or running out of mana. If the size of the heals were smaller, I couldn't tell the difference. The new setup felt better, though. Spell casting was clearly faster and I was able to maintain critical buffs like Harmony with few interruptions. I'm going to stick with the haste setup for now. Wild is still just shy of the 2005 haste number he wants, and I've been eyeing an i378 off-hand that could replace Wild's current i365 and get him the haste he wants. It's very expensive, though, and Happy has been balking, noting that patch 4.3 is right around the corner. Wild is not very patient, but so far Happy has won out.