Back to business

It's all been a bit quiet for the past few weeks, but now the summer break is over, the kids are back at school, and everyone's hunkered down in front of their screens waiting for global warming/climate change to freeze them in. And that means that it's time to go raiding again! My raid group now has Naxx pretty much on farm status, so we've progressed a bit. Last night we hit Trial of the Crusader (a first for most people) and Ulduar (a first for me).

Trial of the Crusader

I'm the first to admit that the rationale for TotC is pretty silly. As Tamarind pointed out, why would you want all your best fighters killing each other, rather than killing the scourge. Still, when all's said and done I'm not much of a lore geek, and it drops some phat lewt. When I say it drops good loot, I mean for other people, obviously, since I'm still in tatty looking ilevel 200 stuff whilst everyone and his dog who have been pugging heroics are in shiny new ilevel 245 gear. Not that I mind really except when the Leet Warlock shows off his steaming new shoulders to me, and tops me in the DPS meters.

That all sounds a little grumpy, but I'm not really. What I really like is experiencing new content and the gear is really just a means to an end. This was particularly apparent in the Trial of the Crusader.

We downed the Beasts of Northrend, after wiping a couple of times on the Jormungar. The consensus was that we needed to down Acidmaw first and stay close enough for the healers to get to everyone. After that it wasn't too tricky.

Lord Jaraxxus went down in a couple of tries, after our off-tanks understood just how fickle the Mistresses of Pain were. There was lots of high level discussion about taunting and healing as well, which, as a simple DPS, I largely ignored. I just wanted to be able to summon him myself! We got the usual plate healing gear for disenchanting and I lost a roll for a l337 ring.

This was all well and good, so we were feeling pretty cocky when we met the faction champions. Where we were unceremoniously handed our asses on a plate. I've never been a terribly good PvP'er, and this had very much the feel of being ganked in Stranglethorn by a gang of higher level characters. I haven't PvP'd in a while, and all my buttons were in the wrong places. I was stunlocked by the rogue and with a resilience of 0, swiftly had my forsaken face pushed into the dirt. As Heidegger would have said, this finite determination of undeath achieved its own definition. If he played WoW.

And to top it all off, Varian Wrynn called us scrubs! Frankly I'm surprised that he didn't come down to /spit and teabag us.

Ulduar

On to Ulduar. I've never been there before, but you can see that a fair amount of love has been lavished on the place. I'm not an enormous fan of vehicle quests in general, but watching iron dwarf minions being crushed beneath the tracks of my lumbering great tank was a lot of fun. We didn't do any of the hard modes or anything and the Flame Leviathan went down, even though I briefly disconnected in the middle. Hmm. Perhaps I wasn't entirely crucial to the whole affair...

Anyway on XT-002 I was assigned to AoEing the adds, plus my usual nuking. They all blew up in a very satisfying manner, and gave my cold dead heart a little lift. Why does a big metal monster sound like a little girl though? What with his heart popping in and out I found it all rather surreal. It went down though. No! No! No! No! No!

It was getting late by then, so after we wiped a couple of times on Ignis, we called it a night. I'm pleased that we've made the move to Ulduar, since it means that I might actually get my hands on a decent wand and get my Epic achievement.