Epics, Mounts, Dailies, Kara

So, I've been playing a lot lately, job hunting has left me with way too much free time, and not nearly enough money, so WoW has become my time-waster of choice.

I wanted to comment on a few things (assorted K-style ramblings to follow):

I love purples. Abs is almost totally out of blues now, just his breastplate remains, and that is only 14 badges from being taken care of. 164 badges from being out of things to buy from the Badge vendor. Sounds like a lot, right? well, thats 2 months if all I run is Kara.

Pos... I don't even know. I don't even know where his upgrades are going to come from anymore. I suppose I should start looking for that. What to get. Where to go. What heroics may be upgrades. I got burned out on him shortly after I hit 70. I pushed pretty hard to get his gear up to par and get him not only Kara ready, but, to be a good tank as well. I see too many bad ones out there.

Mounts. Abs got an epic mount. I cannot stress this enough to anyone who debates this. I did it wrong. Get your epic mount FIRST before you get gear. Abs blew a TON of money on gear, Spellstrike Hood and Pants, Belt of Blasting, gear for Pos. I should've bought my mount first. The amount of time it saves you running dailies, farming mats, whatever it may be is unbelievable.

Dailies. I love them, and I loathe them. The SSO dailies took Pos 3x as long to do as Abs. At least. Its kind of sad. Pos is still sitting with quests not even began in Blades Edge Mountians, SMV and Netherstorm. I mean, he hasn't really began any quests in those zones at all.

Soon, I'm gonna respec him fury and get all those quests done within a couple weeks. Can't beat the rep, right?

Karazhan. I get the feeling some of the guild is getting burned out on Kara. They want a change of pace. They want to see something new. ZA is on the horizon. Okay, its beyond the horizon flying at us as fast as reavers

I'm worried my friends are worried I'm going to get poached by another guild as I've been trying to run ZA whenever I see a guild pugging it... plus I've made some good friends with the Got Milk crew, and they are a really fun bunch. Reminds me a LOT of KoU. I've learned a lot from them. Heck, I think KoU, without prompting, can get the first chest our first run in ZA. Just have to get people to realize that its gonna be a wipe fest our first time in there. For sure.

Wipe-o-rama.

I think we can get past the first 2 bosses, maybe past the 3rd.

We'll see.

So, guys, its coming. Maybe this week.

Read up on the strats....

The hiatus is over...

I got my steak, so I have to start posting again.

First things first, we just ran Kara again on Friday night. It went very, very well. It was Pos's first time as a tank through the whole instance.

We went Attumen to Prince down in just over 3 hours, skipping only Illhoof (no warlock). My fellow tank was Owaru, and we only ran into problems when I noob-bulled a pat before Opera, and when I was tanking Prince during phase 2, I went down twice.

The 3rd time was a charm, though, and we took him down.

Then we went to try Netherspite. After the first couple of tries, we got the strategy down (its a tough one to do without ever having seen it)

We had him to 18% but the untimely death of Orzag the Uber cost us.

We then had respawns and decided to call it, as we were past the 4 hour mark at that time.

Things I learned:

Offtank/tank synergy is a big deal. If you're the tank or offtank, your job is not only to hold aggro, its to mark, to prepare, and to keep the raid moving through trash.

Your job is NOT to dps. Your 180 dps means diddly poop on trash mobs. Take that 15 seconds and go mark the next group. Why? So as soon as the current target dies (after a quick check on healer mana - dps mana doesn't matter, no matter how much they whine) you can then pull the next group and keep the raid moving. 30 seconds here, and a minute there turns a 3 hour run into a 4 hour run.

I think that is the biggest difference between our current runs and our old regime runs.

Setting a DPSer to be the loot master, also another plus. When you down a boss, everyone but the loot master heads to the next spot. By making it a non-tank and non-healer, we can just roll on.

I felt like I did a good job. Like things went smoothly. The usual suspects praised me, but, I think they would do that if we wiped 87 times on Attumen, because, they are my good friends.

Next step? Netherspite and Nightbane.

We may need a 2-run week to do that, perhaps, next weekend we'll give it a go.

One night for a clear, one night for a learning process (and flasks for everyone!)