More adventures of the Tiny Tamer

Living in Deadwind Pass battling Lydia and experiencing the afterlife courtesy of a pitchfork wielding ghost every day can only sap the spirit for so long before inflicting lifelong nightmares so my tiny Tamer Trisella decided to hell with it before she turned into a quivering wreck at the mere sight of a farm implement and packed up and went on a world adventure.

Stopping briefly in Stormwind to sell off the junk Lydia had been foisting on her each day in lieu of useful things like Battle stones (though not without gold value, thank you Lydia) and changing into an attire more becoming to a world tourer ( I don’t think it is appropriate to travel naked), Trisella was ready to go explore. Having heard stories of a semi-deserted beach at the end of the world with an ex-pirate turned Pet Tamer who was willing to pet battle for fun, Trisella decided to make that her first stop.

With the removal of automatically learned flight paths, Trisella had a long journey ahead of her since public Gryphon transport could only take her  to Duskwood; then it was onto the armored bear. Travelling by foot, paw actually, did give some  great opportunities for sightseeing.

 

Finally arriving at her destination, Trisella settled in for  a few weeks relaxing on the beach enjoying the sunshine and lack of angry undead inhabitants armed with pitchforks.

Ahh the joys of professional pet taming.

Sightseeing in Zul’Drak

Raiding Throne of Thunder

This is what my guild got up to last night.  We started a fresh run in Throne of Thunder on Wednesday and got up to Dark Animus so went back last night.  We’ve had a heap of consistency issues over the past few weeks so this is the first night in a while we’ve had the full team together.  And amazingly the 10 of us managed to take down the big boss himself.

I think we were all surprised we actually cleared Throne, most of us were expecting to be working on this boss for a bit. But after a few pulls we managed to stand in what we had to stand in and avoid what we weren’t, people didn’t get flung off the edge or stunned when adds were about to spawn and it all just came together.

This is pretty much my first expansion seeing current content. I started the game mid-cata and raided pretty casually though Firelands  and DS. The guild I was in for DS time cleared it for the first time post-nerf and Firelands I didn’t actually  complete until after dinging 90.

So to actually work my way though Throne of Thunder while it’s still in the current patch let alone expansion is pretty exciting. While loot is pretty nice and definitely makes killing bosses easier, the most exciting thing is the trying of new things, working out what does and doesn’t work, when the best time to pop things is and when to hold off.

I posted a few days ago about being worried by my figures on Megeara, since then I moved away from the heavy spirit build I had and played around with trialling new talents.  I don’t honestly know how I lived before I started using Soul of the Forest; the fights I use it on over Incarnation, you can see the difference in my healing output.  It took a mindset change to move away from feeling I needed to have Incarnationas a safety net for mana regen into trusting that I could manage my mana and the regen would be sufficient. That’s what  I mean by playing around with things. Those few changes made a huge difference and my figures looked heaps better and amazingly I outhealed both  the holy pally and disc priest on two boss kills tonight. Oh boy, I really should stop watching meters, but I am unashamedly  a meter watcher I’m afraid.

Anyway, I had a ball  in the raid and then I went and battled pets and got this for collecting 50 rare pets.

Achievements are nice, no matter how big or small.

Sightseeing in the Blasted Lands

Reins of the Black Primal Raptor and a grinning druid.

3 days ago, as part of my LFR goodie bag, there was a  Primal Egg. I was most excited and couldn’t wait to see what it would hatch into.

Here is Zeirah with her brand new Black Raptor Mount.. can you see how pleased she is.

Sightseeing in Silvermoon

Just Beautiful.

 

 

 

Raid Musing

Last night my raid team went into Heart of Fear. We’re still in progression in there, we’re  up to the fourth boss, Wind Lord Mel’jarak. However, one of our tanks has gone on holidays so I needed to pug us a tank. We had a new guildie join us for the run, who on the armory looked perfect gear wise. Despite being very experienced in the LFR it turned out he wasn’t as confident in a tank role as we would have expected. We had a few pulls on the first boss with deaths due to two members having unexpected lag so both decided to sit out and we asked a dps monk and a disc priest to come with us, two players that we have run with once before.

After an easy run on  Imperial Vizier Zor’lok we get to Blade Lord Ta’yak. The pull should be simple, take the boss in a straight line from his platform to the door, avoiding his tornadoes with the tanks taunting off each other at set times. However, it became anything but simple, the boss zigged and zagged all over the place due to some seriously strange taunting practices of our fill in tank. I commend our regular tank with his extreme patience and the rest of the teams’ skill in managing to stay in the right place at the right time despite not knowing where the boss would be ending up. That boss went down despite the irregularity of the pull and we moved to Gara’lon, the 3rd boss. Someone who, despite the nerf, still manages to present a challenge to us if everything isn’t executed properly. And it was on this boss that our raid team showed me just why I want to spend 6 hours a week in the company of these guys.

The pulls at the start went bad, if there was a tank mechanic to be obeyed our fill in tank disobeyed it. He was trying, we could see that he was but it just wasn’t sinking in. If he had to be in a specific place, he just wasn’t. We regrouped, I explained the fight from the start, our tank, bless his socks, explained the tank perspective and we pulled again. We died, more than once.

I had a think and realised we probably would not be able to do this so I faced the option of calling the raid early or finding us a replacement tank which at that time of night and facing the 3rd boss probably would have been easier said than done. Then our pull in monk mentioned he could tank this boss,  so we had a role swap. The would-be tank would now take the dps role. So we tried again and found that the dps was lacking,   and we wiped at 11%. We tweaked what we were doing and pulled and wiped at 2%. We tweaked again, made sure everyone had their pots at the ready and pulled again and we got the boss to 1%. And what was amazing was the team, rather than being annoyed or rude that we had a fill in member who was quite obviously having difficulties, worked with them, offering a bit of advice, lots of patience and a great deal of humour.  And we pulled again and the boss died.

The atmosphere when the boss went down was phenomenal, it was almost as exciting as when we killed him the first time. There was a real sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.The player who was having the issues thanked us and said he truly appreciated seeing the content and that we were incredibly friendly and patient. And that’s what I realised is truly great about our team; we could have asked him to leave and found a dps or tank that could have made our run easier, but we didn’t, we preserved and the sense of accomplishment was just that much greater and we gave someone an experience they haven’t had before. And that, I think, is truly special in this game.  It’s not something we would want to do every night but last night it just worked and was good. The way our team runs might not be for everyone but for us it’s great.