Wildshard missed the first week of Hour of Twilight (Patch 4.3). This extension of Cataclysm continues the battle with Deathwing and the dragon's minions, taking adventurers into the Caverns of Time. Three linked dungeons set the stage: End Time, Well of Eternity, and Hour of Twilight. The final battles take place within a warped bubble of Time around Wyrmrest Temple called Dragon Soul.
Wild planned to immerse himself in the three new dungeons come Monday. Real life conspired to keep Wild away, however, for the better part of the morning. There was also a bit of raid scheduling confusion that ultimately worked out in Wild's favor. Originally, the only raid scheduled was Mf's Mon/Tues raid. Since there was no Wed/Thurs raid on the schedule, and since Mf's raid was scheduled for the new Dragon Soul (DS) raid, Wild overcame his misgivings about this raid group and signed up for the 6pm raid. That would also give Wild time to get the three dungeons done before the raid. I was under the impression that the dungeons, which had to be done in order the first time they were run, had to be completed before Wild could run DS, since the events in DS were based on what happened in the three dungeons.
That plan went out the window when three things happened - Mf changed his DS raid to a Firelands raid; Lady Hunter put up her raid schedule for Wed/Thurs night (also Firelands), and Bd made a guild call for a DS run at noon on Monday. Talking with Bd, I learned that running DS did not require completing the new dungeons first. Long story short, Wild switched raids from Mf's to Lady Hunter's, and told Bd Wild would be there for the noon DS raid. Since we would not be using the new Looking for Raid (LFR) tool for the noon DS raid, Wild didn't need to do anything but be there. There is a minimum gear requirement, but it's only i365, and Wild's gear level is i371. However, Wild also wanted to try out the LFR at some point, and for that the minimum gear level is i372. Wild fixed that easily by adding to his gear one of the new i378 pvp rings that were flooding the Auction House, bringing Wild's gear score up to the minimum i372.
Wild showed up at noon and Bd was already at work getting the raid ready. Given the time of day, we knew it would take some time, but I was pleasantly surprised that at 1:15pm we not only had a full raid, we had a well balanced raid that included many of our better raiders as well. That said, our overall gear level was closer to the i365 minimum than the LFR i372 requirement.
As previously mentioned, DS is located in the Caverns of Time deep in the Tanaris desert. We had guildies already out there who Summoned the rest of us to the Caverns; otherwise, Wild would likely have portaled from Org to Uldum and then flew into Tanaris from there.
We entered the nearby instance portal and Wild got his first view of Dragon Soul.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
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