Weekend Part One (26 Oct) - The Grizzly Hills

Weekend Part One (26 Oct) - The Grizzly Hills

Santa Anna winds came at us Thursday night and it was stifling hot. It will hopefully blow itself out in a few days. This tome will be getting rather long rather fast, so expect the weekend progress report to be in more than one piece.

Friday - Fist kept herself busy with quests in Grizzly Hills, and then got a chance at some dungeons with level 90 priest Lao. The two slaughtered their way through Gundrak and Drak'Theron Keep with no difficulties other than getting a little lost a couple of times. It had been a long time since the doors of those dungeons had been cracked open. Fist's bags were bulging by the time they were through. She picked up four pieces of gear upgrades.

Fist specced as mistweaver/healer for the run. She remembered to switch to her healing gear set ... but it took a few battles for a confused Fist to figure out why none of her healing spells worked. Monks have stances, and Fist was using the wrong stance. With that corrected, Fist could play around with her healing and DPSing against mobs that hardly lasted long enough for Fist to get in trouble with - Lao is a very efficient killer.

Fist first worked with the spells that provided dps healing: any dps other than auto-attacks generate healing for those nearby; using Blackout Kick every thirty seconds maintains a healing buff as well; and then there is Fist's statue which also generates healing, but which Fist didn't drop because they were never in one place long enough for it to have any effect. These are all relatively low level melee range AoE heals, taking care of low level incoming damage while allowing the monk to dps.

Fist also picked on mobs that weren't already quaking against Lao, and worked on spells to keep herself alive - which was immediate once they aggroed on her. Fist's main goal was just to start recognizing the spells and what they did. That's still a work in progress. Fist did teeter with death at least twice by taking chances in order to learn how things worked ... which wasn't so bad since both of them could rez if necessary - not that there was any chance of Lao dying.

Fist is hoping to have time to make a lot more progress over the weekend. Is level 80 a possibility? Maybe not, but it's a nice goal to go after. With Lao's help, Fist is now at level 76.

Friday Night - Fist had a big night prowling dungeons with level 90 druid Sin. Fist and Sin were up until the wee hours of the morning (after 1am), so Fist will have to be forgiven if she can't exactly recall where they went. As best as she can remember, though, the two took on the Halls of Origination (84-85 level), and two others, Halls of Lightning and Halls of Stone, I think. They did one of those dungeons three times and would have done more but Sin maxed out the number of dungeon runs he could do in a single day. If that restriction hadn't been placed on them, they might STILL be dungeon crawling. 

It was crazy fun. Fist died a few times, but she happily whaled away, and even soloed a few elites that were too terrified of Sin to engage him. On the last run, Sin attempted, and perhaps achieved, a maniacal plan to aggro every single mob and boss in the entire dungeon. Fist stayed well out of the way of that, at least until the tsunami of hostiles followed Sin back to where Fist was hiding ... uh, waiting to engage. Engage Fist did, and it was blood and guts spilled all over the place.

Fist had a good head start on getting to level 77 when they started the dungeon runs, and by the end of the night Fist had reached level 78.