The OOC stuff: We've been running ICC25 partnered with a smaller guild, managing to fill raids and we've made it up TO LK for the past two weeks. Hopefully we can kill him one of these weeks soon. My warlock got her violet protodrake and the upgraded flying speed with her completion of Hallow's End, yay! Briara got the HH mount, which makes me happy. Now if the lock can get one before the event is done...epic! Paladin should complete the Hallowed meta tonight, but she's still only about halfway through her long strange trip. Oh well, Crusader Aura FTW :-) Post patch, I think the tally is as follows: Epic fail at BM hunter, doing about the same as Surv (which wasn't great, but she's the least geared toon). Resto Shaman seems roughly about the same, and I've been having BG fun with her. Elemental looks fun, but I haven't done it much yet. Warlocking as Destruction seems mostly the same. I specced out Affliction but have yet to try it. Ret paladining seems better than previous to me, Prot feels gimped, but doable. And for my beloved bear, I can still tank, it's harder. And at least in PVP, I can actually sometimes kill people. Kinda fun!

Yes, I am totally planning to Stand in Dat Fire.

So that's that - now, back to ( the Story! )

OOC Stuff: Got my ICC 10 drake, next week I got my Ulduar 10 drake, and then the following week I got my Glory of the Hero red proto-drake. I think I did that out of order? Guild is already feeling the burn of the "flexible" raid system. The 10 man was all ready to take on LK heroic-style. The 25 man had cleared up to LK normal. But now everything is all whacked out - hubby suggested the 25 man clear everything but the 3 wing bosses and LK, and that way the 10 man could come in, kill them on heroic and try LK heroic. But the 10M raid leader is also the one who is collecting shards for Shadowmourne, so he wants to kill everything we can on 25s. Now while I don't really have a problem with that, our attendance has been lacking - we've been pulling in friends to fill the raid - and I don't see us killing LK without a consistent core of raiders in 25m. So I probably won't see a LK10 heroic or LK25 normal kill before The Cataclysm. QQ. So I guess, bring it on, administer the coup'de grace so we can get moving again.

And now, we rejoin our story ( already in progress )

OOC: I have a love/hate relationship with my main's guild. On the one hand, there are people l like there. On the other hand, there are some people I consider to be self serving douches there. The guild leader doesn't seem to see the self serving part and plays to it.

After a slow summer in which I was MIA for a couple of months due to health issues on the part of the hubby, we came back to a pretty demoralized raiding environment. So how does one cope with that? Well, one makes/plays alts! Hubby wanted the shiny two seater RAF rocket, so we did that when he was able to sit for stretches of longer than 10 minutes. The first set was RAF druid (Caylina - his) and a mage (I played that on the throwaway account). When the characters hit about 30ish, we threw the Paladin (Veliza) that had been languishing on my main account for years into the fray. Respeced her from ret to prot, and SOMEHOW I managed to keep her within 5 levels of the RAF pair all the way to Outlands. The mage got dropped off at level 57, and we kept going with the druid and paladin - tank healer + LFG queue verily roxxors. They are 80 and raiding ICC with our "other guild" now.

At some point hubby decided that paladin tanking looked fun, and he wanted to try it. To make it more challenging, and see maybe a different side of the game (AND not have the support of heirlooms & momma and poppa main's bankroll), he wanted to roll on a high pop server. Our home server, The Venture Co, is medium pop and slow progression. We eventually settled on Emerald Dream US, a high pop PVP/RP server. Oh yeah, and since our mains are alliance...we'd rolle Horde! Thus were born Caylina the B-Elf paladin and Rhynne, the Forsaken priest.

An introduction might be ( in order. )

A knock sounded at her door. Shadyr twitched, she was not expecting company and she was deeply immersed in trying to decipher a sheaf of trollish texts that had been copied from some of the monuments and sacred sites in Zul'Drak. She was absolutely certain they were related to some ancient variation of the Earthen Ring, and they fascinated her. She laid the manuscripts down and walked over to the door.

( More? )

Briara curled up in the great rocking chair next to the stone fireplace that graced the wall between the living and kitchen area of the house she and her sister had bought. Coming to Northrend had definately wrought a lot of changes, she would have never thought of sharing a domocile with her draenei sister before, but it was working out well. Possibly because neither one of them lived there full time. The medium sized manor had been a steal, the previous owner having been one of the first agrarian types to take up holding near Valgarde Landing, but also one of the first to realize his nerves were just not cut out for having occasional vrykul poaching off him, nor for having proto-drakes suddenly swoop down and carry off a stock animal.

( More? )

Shadyr left the harbor in Stormwind frustrated and insulted. She did not yet have enough money to buy passage to Northrend and had generally been treated as an ignorant child, though one shipmaster had offered to take her if she was willing to make an "arrangement" with him. She had made a mental note of that ship's name so as to not walk anywhere within 100 feet of it or its' perverted master in the future.

She was going to have to return home, her first attempt at fulfilling the request her mother had given her a failure. At least hiring one of the trained gryphons that flew out of Stormwind were not hard on her apparently underpopulated coin purse. She selected one of the Nethergarde trained ones and half drowsed as the steady beat of the wings and rush of the warm summer air combined to lull her senses during the long trip. She enjoyed that state of mind - she could hear the voices of the wind as the eddies and skeins of breezes tangled around the gryphon's fast moving wings. If she could be bothered to open her eyes, she thought she might even catch a glimpse of the air spirits, but she never tried - it was enough to know they were close.

( More? )

I haven't updated in a while, quite possibly because I've been staying up WAY too late exploring and it's actually been rather busy at the ole work thing IRL. But just...wow! Blizzard outdid themselves with Northrend. The only thing I have a small beef with is that many of the weapon and armor graphics are the same. More variety never hurt anyone! But the zones themselves make up for it by far. The quests show a lot of imagination. And of course there are more poop (and bonus vomit!) quests, so obviously everyone's inner 6 year old can get a giggle.

More ( back this way. )

Arena hates me, really it does. We start to do well and kablooey, we hit a losing streak or something. I'd used most of my points and had as much of a resto set as I was likely to get, so there wasn't much left to do but spend my 3400 points on *something* since last night was the last night, and rumor had it that the points would be gone today too. Now my 3v3 team rating was 1603...but my personal rating was 1592. So we were going to play just one more game so I could get my feral BP. All well and good...the players being me, mostly kitteh druid, my favorite prot/ret pally and hubby as disc priest.

( Real all about it! )

Daoloth, our prodigal holy priest was on last night. He's been wanting to try his new spec in an instance but we keep doing things like playing alts, PvPing, etc. Tarla and Banderas were busily Arenaing, but I'd just gotten a tell from Some Random Dude asking if I was a tank or healer. So I asked Dao if he wanted to instance (but it would just be me and pugs) and he jumped on it, so I replied to Joe Random and asked if he needed a tank and healer still. He did, and off we went to Heroic Bot, to complete the double daily (it was heroic and normal daily for our server last night).

The MAGE! ( The Fail! )

Briara rested calmly on the crown of one of the giant mushrooms of the Zangermarsh. The sun slanted down behind the cruel spikes of the Blades Edge mountains to the north, striking diamond and ruby flashes off the many lakes of the wetlands. A curious marshwalker extended its' waving tendrils upwards, sensing her presence, but it quickly concluded that she was not close enough to investigate more thoroughly. She closed her eyes, listening to the ebb and flow of the multitude of life, the hum of the bugs, the gentle splashes the receding marshwalker made, the soft thrum of a ripper hunting far below. A light breeze ruffled her sun warmed black fur. She finally heard the sound she was waiting for...the quick flap of a griffon's wings. She thought to herself "Late, as usual." ( More? )