Wednesday (4 Apr) - Blade Magnet

Wednesday (4 Apr) - Blade Magnet

I'm not sure how it happened, but Wild keeps getting stuck with weapons. Yes, having steel thrust at him (not to mention claws, hammers, axes, swords, daggers, polearms, etc) is just part of the business of war, but that's not what Wild meant. When Wild hung up his pre-Dragon Soul mace for the i390 Maw, Wild was excited because it was the best weapon he could get short of running normal mode DS. The Maw served Wild very well. The guild started running Dragon Soul, and eventually Wild got his first i397 weapon, [Vagaries of Time]. Wild loves the look of the Vagaries mace, with it's rotating, cogged wheels. Technically, the Maw was still the better weapon, because of a healing proc that was far more powerful than just about any other weapon proc out there. Wild didn't care, he wanted to use his new mace, and justified it by saying that the additional haste and mastery compensated for the Maw's uber proc.

In Wednesday night's raid yet another i397 weapon dropped: [Scalpel of Unrelenting Agony]. The base stats were the same as those of the Vagaries mace, but the secondary stats included spirit instead of crit, which was a modest improvement. Wild rolled on it, as did some others. When we sorted out who really wanted it, though, everyone was kind of, like, Eh. The shaman and priest healers had the Maw, and they would not part with that healing proc. We had a guildie running his moonkin in a raid for the first time, and he was using an i378 staff. When Wild offered the dagger to him, he said no, because he "wasn't that serious" about his moonkin spec. Wild ended up with the dagger. That moonkin, by the way, ended up getting four i397 pieces of gear - a wealth of druid gear that Wild already had. The dagger was all Wild walked away with. Unfortunately, Wild missed a critical flaw in the dagger. It had no socket. The Vagaries mace did. Sigh. The good news, though, is that Wild's pick up of the dagger didn't hurt him in rolling on later gear - since nothing else dropped that Wild could use. Plus, the dagger is one of the best looking daggers I've seen, and when Wild gets tired of the rotating cogs on his Vagaries, he can use the dagger for a transmog.

The raid itself was one of the RG2's best ever. Wild wasn't supposed to be in the raid, of course. We are going to be at the opening day of the baseball season here in San Diego Thursday night, so Wild won't be available. Usually the raid leader, Bk, wants to have a group that can make both nights, so Wild was in game on Wednesday only in case Bk was short on healers. He was, and Wild got the invite.

We smashed through Morchok so easily Bk figures that next week we can drop to two healers and add a DPS to speed the fight up even more. Wild was so bored he offered to take the explosions (three raiders must absorb them when they pop up) so that the DPS could keep whaling away.

The Yor'sahj fight want just as quickly, and in no time at all we were at the third boss, the Warlord. This one always takes us several tries, and it's so frustrating because it shouldn't be that rough. Bk offered a challenge - bring him down on our first try.

We might have done it, but we got a bounce where the ball went at complete right angles to the direction it should have gone. Someone might have been out of place, but however it happened, the tank and melee had a long run and despite some rather ingenious attempts to redirect it, we ended up wiping. It was a Fail on our challenge.

We more than made up for it on our second attempt, when, ahem, Wild saved the day. Wild was tank healing, and well into the fight the melee and ranged got tangled up too close to each other. When that happens the raid, and the tank in particular, really take some horrendous damage from that ping-ponging ball. The raid leader told Wild later that he almost called for us to just wipe it up and start again, but when the tank failed to die, we recovered and went back to work. Wild did some crazy healing on that tank. We killed the Warlord on our second try, the first time we'd done that, and a great confidence builder.

There was a guildie in game who was doing her rogue quest chain, so we took a break after the third boss, invited her into the raid, and she went to pickpocket Hagara. She failed the first time and Hagara killed her, but got her quest done successfully the second time around. The raid then turned our own sights on Hagara, and killed him on our first attempt.

Shockingly, we still had enough time left to go after the fifth boss, Ultraxion, and his army of dragons. We've spent entire evenings on Ultraxion and the trash mobs. On this night we cleared all of the dragons without a wipe. And then we killed Ultraxion on our first attempt. Five bosses down on our first night.

We even made two attempts on the sixth boss, Warmaster Blackhorn and the flying ship, getting in some additional practice. It was quite a night.

Wild really, REALLY, wishes he could be there Thursday night. Warmaster Blackhorn is definitely going to go down.