Cenarion Druids are Dumb

Cenarion Druids are Dumb. That is the overwhelming impression I'm left with from doing all the Mount Hyjal quests.



You want me to climb a tree, grab an angry and uncooperative bear cub, and hurl it onto a target. You don't think that the cub will maul me or worry that my aim may be off? Nothing could possibly go wrong? Really?!?

Between this quest and the quest a slightly earlier in the zone that has you saving fluffy little animals from the fire, I really wonder if they have any brains at all.

I clearly remember thinking in BC that the Cenarion Expedition was full of stupidity. But, based on Silithus, I had concluded that the Cenarion Circle had sent all of their idiots to Outland. Now it seems that between Outland, Borean Tundra, and now Mount Hyjal my conclusion was erroneous. Perhaps instead the druids in Silithus ran to the horrible and insect filled desert to hide from the stupidity of the rest of the Cenarions?

Whale Shark!

We killed the Whale Shark. It happened a while ago actually. But still, Whale Shark dead!



It was really annoying to tank. See, the whale shark does roughly one million damage per hit. No, really, he hit Mornara for 900k only because her armor mitigated some of that damage. However, to balance this out he swims really slowly. And to balance that out he will drop threat if you're more than 20 yards away. Also, just for fun, his hit box is itty.

So I ended up swimming backwards in front of him on Mornara, but not too fast. And thumping the whale shark with all the ranged things I could think of. There were only about twelve of us, so it took a while to whittle him down, but it worked out.



In fact, a few days after Kuan and Mornara killed the giant annoying fish, Viljo and Eeyan did too. I wanted to beat Wian for suggesting that I tank again on Viljo, but it was actually a lot easier on Viljo that on Mornara. Viljo has a talent that lets him cast scorch while moving, so I just slowly swam in front scorching.



Its rather disturbing to see that mouth bearing down on you. Also, for scale, you can see Eeyan going stabby-stabby on the right side of the shark.

Old Crafty

I'm not all that big on fishing. In fact, it's pretty safe to say I think it is dead boring. I only every really started getting it seriously leveled on any character until achieves came out.

Unfortunately for me all the good food for tanking, caster dps, and healing is made from fish. And the caster/healer fish is really hard to catch. So I've dutifully been doing the daily fishing quests. I hadn't really been trying for any achieves.

But then I fished up Old Crafty and got the achieve for catching him.



It turns out that Kuanchichi has been trying to catch him and get that achieve for months, perhaps even years. So there was a bit of anger from the seat next to me. Fortunately for me Kuan caught Old Crafty only a week or so after I did.

Icecrown Citadel 10 achieves

Monday night I took our fun raid to ICC for normal mode achieves. We didn't do anything on heroic. All we did was the ICC 10 Drake Achieve for every boss.



Well, almost every boss. We started a bit late, so the raid only formed up at 9:30. We got the achieve for every boss up to LK, though not every one need every achieve. In fact, I think most people were only missing at most six or seven achieves. But they were spread out over about 10 bosses.

Most of the achieves were rendered pretty trivial. With the massive health, damage, and healing buffs that we've all gotten from Cata things would have been pretty easy. When you add the 30% ICC buff on top of that some things were just silly. Mornara for example, had 226k health. I remember being really happy when I got her to 30k health in the middle of Wrath...

However, the Sindragosa achieve was NOT trivial. Her frost tombs are still pretty fatal. I think they do a percentage of your total health as damage while you're in them. Also, her achieve is All You Can Eat, which is to make sure that no one gets more than 5 stacks of the mystic buffet debuff.

It was brutal. We went with a 3 tank setup: Mornara, Wian, and Earthen, just so we'd have a little bit of leeway for stack dropping. There was at least one time where we had to wipe because I got pulled in for biting cold right before I could hide behind a frost tomb and drop my stacks. :(

We also had a fair number of unintentional wipes where multiple people got tombed. Either someone didn't see the mark on their head and tombed the entire group hiding behind the current tomb, or the previous tomb hadn't been broken out yet and we had a 3rd tomb up. And then, usually the person in the first tomb would die.

But we persevered! And it was a sweet sweet victory to get All You Can Eat.


Next week, we'll do an hour of fishing to work on the guild feast achieve and then go to ICC10 to finish up the last LK achieve. Been Waiting a Long Time for This I suppose the name is rather appropriate.

the things our toons put up with

when he got the [Fossilized Raptor], I adjusted Kuanchichi's raptor mount macro to include it. And it never came up!

Until he had occasion to visit Brunnhildar Village.

Accidental Heroic

Yesterday I was home sick. After napping and other sick related activities, which I shall not go into, I woke up around 4-ish feeling slightly better. I went down stairs to the lounge and puttered a bit. Put some music on, petted the doggies, settled on the futon with some hot chocolate.

I logged in and did some WoW stuff, too. Khyrie got a level or two. Mornara did her daily JC quest and the fishing quest. I hopped on Telt and did the daily cooking and fishing quests with her, too.

Then I thought that perhaps a nice dungeon run with Telt would be a good thing. She's just at the point where normals are pretty ok. In theory, her gear is over the limit for running heroics. However, in practice I think some of the gear that is counting towards that limit is for her damage set. DraNgNon has been agitating for Eeyan and Telt to run heroics. Especially since Eeyan needs Chaos Orbs for the Blacksmithing. So I figured that a normal dungeon would be good for getting some more rep and maybe a piece of gear or two.

I queue Telt up and 7 minutes later the window pops up and I'm healing.

It was an in progress Halls of Origination. The gauntlet part had already been cleared and the group had clearly wiped on Anraphet. But I kept us all alive, and we handily killed him. We go up the elevator and also handily kill Isiset.

Well, perhaps not quite handily. These pulls were taking all of my mana. Even the trash pulls were leaving me with only mana left. It was pretty rough, the everyone was taking a lot of damage. I took a quick look at the tank's health and the dps of the group. The tank had a fair amount of health, was he just stacking stam and not picking up any mitigation stats? Hmm, the dps were actually not doing as much as Eeyan was the other night, in Halls of Origination, but as a group their average was at or above that previous group. So why were things taking so long to die?

Anyway we engage Rahj. Not too bad a fight, even if the mage decided that standing in my healing range was a silly idea. But then Rahj drops dead and Telt gets the achieve for HEROIC Halls of Origination. OMG Heroic! I thought this was a normal. My jaw literally dropped. I had healed a heroic, and I hadn't even noticed. I struggled a bit because I thought it was a crappy group, but, aside from frantically remembering all my mana regeneration tools, it hadn't been all that bad.

I even won the Chaos Orb.

Ascendant Council

Sunday Darkfall went into Bastion of Twilight again. This time we had the whole evening to work on Ascendant Council. It was a rocky start, since we had a bunch of people who hadn't seen it at all.

It took a bunch of attempts, but we got phase one down and I started calling out every single upcoming thunderstorm and quake in phase two. Then we started getting to phase three regularly. And of course in phase three we died horribly to start with.

But we persevered! Our winning attempt was a crazy mess of people dropping like flies to the gravity and the lightning. I was spamming every single survivability cooldown I had. Death Strike FTW! It ended with me and our dps death knight the only ones still up. The other DK had jumper cables and even managed to get them to work on Kuan after the dust settled.



Our phase 3 was a crazy mess of running about, but our phase 1 and 2 on that attempt were just about perfect. No one died in either of the first two phases, and we had both pairs of bosses hit 25% health at just about the same time.

I'm so proud of Darkfall. :D