That title just about says it all, doesn’t it?

Oh yeah, and the music is Breathe Today by Flyleaf and Stand My Ground by Within Temptation.

Damn, did we have fun!

And Graimerin got some darn tasty tanking boots, too.

Sidhevsnalorakk.mpg

You read that correctly, my gamer friends.

If you are on a budget, and wish to spend your carefully saved, hard earned money on expensive electronics, please do yourself a favor and don’t spend that money at Best Buy.

Allow me to regale you with a 100% factual real life story.

(more…)

So, writing the previous post, I went to grab a link to Two and a Half Orcs, so’s I could link to Wulfa, and found that she’d just written a blog post about the very run I was talking about.

And she said something that I think is very flattering, and made me want to post a kind of gear status update.

Wulfa said;

And there was something else I forgot to mention about Kara. I really shouldn’t, because Cassie has enough to deal with But TripleB’s druid tanking Prince is just a beautiful sight. He engages, we all hunker down, everything gets quiet on Vent, and we start our dps. And we keep going, and going, and going. And then he (Prince) dies. And it never seemed as if the bear tanking with his face ever really had any trouble.

So, you might ask yourself, what are the TripleB’s stats, that week after week, whether he has two people on heals or three, they keep getting Prince to go down?

In this run, I don’t think I ever really dropped below 10k health. So yeah, it’s not my skill, it’s my gear and the quality of our healers more than anything.

I can’t give you our healers, they’re MINE, my precious, Gollum!, but I can tell you what my gear is.

Here’s a list of my current gear, so you can see where I’m at. This is all gear that is available without doing 25 man raid content, by the way… but it does take a lot of Badges of Honor. But not a single piece of 25 man raid loot. Bear’s Honor.

So, as you can see, a lot of Badge rewards, and some Kara drops, a PvP item, and some BoE Auction House loot. Plus, of course, exalted with Cenarion Expedition for the big honking hammer… and I still have the 75 Badge chest piece because I bought it a few weeks before the 100 Badge reward armor was announced. I am somewhat opposed to replacing a 75 Badge item with a 100 Badge item. Damnit.

So, am I done?

No, there are still two rewards I could look for.

One is the 100 Badge chest piece, which I’m not even sure I’ll buy since that’s a lot of Badges, and it would irritate the hell out of me, on general principle.

And the other is the Commendation of Kael’thas, which I’ll get sooner or later once I start running Heroic Magister’s Terrace. Something both Cassie and I really want to do, but it always seems that either we’re doing Guild admin kinda stuff, or we’re doing something else in or out of the game that just prevents us from having the time. 

I am at the point now where I’m pretty darn happy with my bear tanking gear for the content that I will be doing with the Sidhe Devils.

And I am even happier when it’s gear that I can realistically tell anyone, “You can do this also, if you are willing to do Heroics and PUG or run Kara once a week, do some CE runs, and do a teeny bit of PvP.”

It is, perhaps, a sign that I’m not a nice person, when I read a story about someone else’s misery, and start laughing my big butt off.

This weekend, at the same time Sidhe Devils was in Karazhan, our friends in Blood for Blood were also in there.

Now, both guilds took about the same amount of time to clear it, and had the same success.

We had some confusion in our own run, two brand new members came in to have fun, and got taken out of the game by a thunderstorm rolling through their area. So we lost about an hour and a half, all things considered, finding a few more folks, getting them in and filling it out.

There might have been a ‘Jets vs Sharks’ dance fight in Curator’s Hall while we waited. And the gals might have won. Maybe. I’ll neither confirm nor deny. Damn it. We woulda had it except Morthog stayed in Dwarf form. Next time, do a /dance with the flaming Draenei statue, man! Just saying.

It turned out great for us, though, since one of the folks that we pounced on the second he logged in, and proceeded to drag kicking and screaming into Kara was Eustacius, co-creator of Road to BlizzCon, and as he mentioned on his own blog… for him, it was Christmas in July.

I love it when that happens. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, either.

So we had a slow down during the run, kept us up a lot later than we expected… but hey, when it ends up giving Wulfa a chance to get her Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix… well…. YAHOO! I’ll stay up. Yup! Not a problem. Truthfully, I’ve been rooting for her to get that bow for weeks now…. I think it’s very pretty.

Now, as I said, Blood for Blood also went in and had a successful run in Kara at the same time, and took about the same amount of time to do it.

However, the reason for their delay was a little bit different.

Graimerin wrote about it on his blog, and as I read about his pain and sorrow while tanking in there with this one really bad player… as I said at the start of this article, I was rolling with laughter.

Why?

Well, there was this one part that brought back the memories…

Grai said;

We were moving through upper ballroom pulling the non-elite trash near the doorway to maidens hallway. Again we had someone pull the elite group, so I run over to where the healers are grouped, consecrate, have all the nasties on me, and then ‘poof’ they leave me.

3B on my honor this is the truth, when the mobs suddenly depart from me I look up and see that I got DI’d; yeah one of our pally healers DI’d the tank. Needless to say we wiped again.

And as I read that, I remembered that feeling…

that feeling you get when everything goes to hell, with mobs running around smacking the people under your protection, and panic and terror runs wild through the squishies, and you hold your cool, stay calm and collected, run over to reclaim aggro and bring order out of chaos… and then watch it all fall apart with no clue what the hell just happened.

And you ask yourself, “Why can’t I do anything?”

And then look up and notice, sitting there grouped amidst the 10 other raid buff icons, that little symbol that says, “Hi, you done been protected by Divine Intervention… sucker.”

Yep, I read Grai’s rundown of the event, and all I could do was yell at the screen that blessed quote from the first Die Hard movie…

“Welcome to the party, pal!”

Monday evening, we’re going to go on in and have fun going after the bear boss in ZA.

What, you heard all this before?

Well, yes, it’s true that I’ve been in ZA before… and yes, it’s true I’ve tanked Nalorakk.

And it was lots of fun.

So I think it would be cool for those that would like to, to get to see the fun of the main gate opening, and the bear fights, and what the heck… it’s not like doing the first boss takes all that long.

In talking to Cassie, I realized that there is an extra benefit to doing ZA in Sidhe Devils.

Everyone can go talk to Griftah in Lower City and get the ZA quest to the Ghostlands, and once we get inside, can get their 20 slot bags if they haven’t already.

And once he’s down, we can bring any other 70s from the guild in to get their bags, too.

Hey… 20 slot bags don’t just grow on…

Oh wait, you can buy 22s now?

Oh.

Okay, well, nevermind.

It’s still going to be fun.