Weekend (11 Mar) - Daeth, Dying, and Deadmines

Weekend (11 Mar) - Daeth, Dying, and Deadmines

It's been another long week of Real Life and not much Warcraft. Taxes took up a part of the week, and a great visit with our nephew from Virginia took up a chunk of the weekend. Sometimes it seems like the only time we get out to see the sights of our city is when we show it off for visitors. It was a lot of fun. Our nephew is doing the whole coast of California in a rented convertible, from San Diego to San Francisco, on the first vacation of his 26 year young life.

Last week Happy opened the Auction House to find that one of his competitors had dumped his entire stock of darkmoon cards on the AH for 100 gold each. Darkmoon cards, depending on the type, go from 100g to sometimes 1500g for a single card. Cards are bought and traded on the AH, of course, but their main use is the creating card sets that are turned in for i359 trinkets. Happy bought A LOT of them in the feeding frenzy that followed when the cards popped up. Happy is only familiar with the waves and winds cards, but bought many of the other types of cards, as well. That has proved more of a pain than a benefit, as there aren't enough to make sets, and with the dumping of all those cards they are difficult to sell as singles. The +int trinket from the waves card set are popular, though, and will sell if patient. Happy has sold two sets so far, for far more than what the cards had cost. The +agi trinket from a set of winds cards have been posted twice without selling, but it's only a matter of time. If Daeth can still use an i359 +int trinket when the Darkmoon Faire comes back around, Happy made enough profit on the other decks to afford the cards to create another full deck by then.

Neither Wild nor JB have run a single lfr DS this past week, and at least JB is going to need to get that done or she'll miss an opportunity to add another i397 piece to her gear. Hopefully that will get done on Monday. Wild will try to squeeze in some time, too, if possible.

Sunday night was the only night with some excitement. JB had just logged in to do some crafting. JB didn't know that Daeth was in game - until she saw the message in guild chat that he had just DINGED! to level 85! Congratulations!

We celebrated with a Tol'vir normal dungeon run, pounding through that one easily. Daeth picked up a helm which jumped his equipped gear score from i316 to i337, and that got us into a Heroic dungeon on our next run. The dungeon was The Deadmines. The Deadmines Wild knew was a 15-20 something level dungeon, that was as long as it was fun to do. Back in the day JB had even farmed the place solo to get a cat companion that could only be acquired from there.

That was not The Deadmnines we were headed for. The Heroic Deadmines was a tough dungeon with some creative boss encounters. Neither JB nor Wild has ever been inside Heroic Deadmines. JB was perhaps the best geared of our group when we started out. Our tank, a druid, took crazy chances, aggroing gobs of trash mobs, while being unable to keep them all from striking out at other players. JB spent as much time pulling mobs off the healer as she did banging on whatever the tank was hitting. When JB had time to stand and deliver, she tended to over-aggro because the tank couldn't focus on mobs long enough build up enough aggro of his own. That's not to say that JB wasn't a bit scatter-brained as well. JB hadn't gotten any work in almost a week and was feeling pretty bloodthirsty. JB paid for it, though, dying twice when she in effect ended up tanking groups of mobs that she'd pulled off the tank.

The boss fights, by comparison, went more smoothly. It was funny, though, when we reached the end of the mines, having cleared the first five bosses, and two of our party left, thinking they were done. Well, The Deadmines has a special, heroic mode only boss named Vanessa Vancleef. The three of us that were still in the dungeon thought about three manning the encounter, but we had no healer and JB, in her enhancement spec, did not have near the mana needed to heal the fight. It was quickly a moot point, though, as the dungeon finder sent us two replacements, and we were able to finish off Vancleef. It was a lot of fun, and JB's first run of The Deadmines.

And congratulations again on hitting level 85!