Neitzsche the Primal

Not to be outdone by Pax, Neitzsche too has stepped up to the 375 Tailoring plate and equipped himself with some purpz:

• Primal Mooncloth Shoulders
  
• Primal Mooncloth Robe
  
• Primal Mooncloth Belt
  
• Whitemend Hood
  
• Shattered Sun Pendant of Restoration

And no doubt the Whitemend Pants are just around the corner to complete the set.

Hit Rating 0. But who needs it: +1103 Healing and a 10.84% Heal Crit chance means The Elder are bowing down and praying to Neit...

Paxmortis the Icelord

Tailoring is complete.

375. Eight purple items, socketed and ready to rock. All new Frozen Shadoweave Shoulders, a Frozen Shadoweave Robe
, a Belt of Blasting to hold up the Spellstrike Pants, and a pair of Frozen Shadoweave Boots. Combined with the Destruction Holo-gogs, a Seer's Signet, and of course the Gladiator's War Staff.

+654 Damage, +833 Frost Damage. 17.76% Crit chance, Hit Rating 135 (bring on the raid bosses)...

And -

Went from 3100g to 45g in one sitting!

But it's worth it. Denmother said something interesting... He said once you reach 70 WOW stops being about creating the perfect character and shifts to creating the perfect group. Pretty xool philosophy.

I'll miss Enchanting, but Tailoring is the best for the group and therefore Pax. Bring on the Heroics.

(In an epic display of Guild leadership, Paxmortis dropped super high Enchanting for Tailoring...and lived to tell this tale)

Dragonslaying

One of the quests in Shadowmoon Valley eventually grants you a nice headpiece - one for each class. But first you have to kill a dragon.

Neit was having connection issues, so Blackheathen, Fugg, and Stroeb set out on a suicide mission to take down Vhel'kur atop the spires of SMV.

Atop the mountain

Three musketeers

Incoming

Slain

Success! And the reward, for Stroeb at least, was a look of pure evil:

Evil incarnate

A Murmur of discontent

The Elder converged on Shadow Labyrinth Thursday last, eager to follow up the all time session we'd had the week prior. SLABs is home to the Shadow Council and it's nefarious ways, as well as four testing bosses. Some of the trash mobs step it up a gear too, the Fel Overseer in particular take a lot of killing.

Happily we worked our way very efficiently through the bottom dwellers, avoiding our customary trash wipe before arriving at the first boss, Ambassador Helmaw. He has a nasty fear effect that sends the DPS and tank scattering, but WotF and a ramp down of ranged DPS meant we tank and spanked him without too much trouble. And a nice pair of Jaedenfire Gloves made us optimistic about the drop to come...falsely, as it turned out!

Hellmaw

Our next boss was Blackheart the Inciter, a dumb ogre with a heavy hit. This was (allegedly) the toughest boss in the instance, thanks to one particularly nasty debuff - Incite Chaos. This has the not so hilarious impact of "Full party mind control. The party will go free for all, and start randomly killing each other." As you can imagine, a Combat Swords Rogue unleashing on a hapless Neitzsche could pretty much wipe him instantly. So within 20 seconds of the fight starting, we all dumped every buff and cooldown we could, so that Blackheart couldn't turn them against us when we were controlled.

As it turned out, we made it through - partly due to luck (the DPS mostly ended up attacking each other each time we were controlled), and partly due to brilliant healing by Neit after the control wore off. After dropping some useless Druidic gloves, Blackheart ended up literally face down in the concrete.

Blackheart down

Our penultimate foe was Grandmaster Vorpil, who has a habit of summoning a constant stream of Void Travelers to his side to assist in the fight.

Vorpil

This ended up being a little tricky, and we wiped once before working out a nice tactic of kiting him around the room, leaving him out of range of his travelling helpers. Down he went too, leaving behind a worthless pile of Pally plate. Our phantom Druid/Paladin is still the best geared on Barthilas.

Finally we came up against Murmur. And finally, we met our match. This guy is a nightmare. He has about three disasterous abilities, ranging from a Sonic Boom that smacks everyone in range for 70%-85% of total health, to Murmur's Touch that randomly targets then explodes it's victim, to Resonance that starts stacking 2000 nature damage on everyone if no-one is DPS range.

Murmur

We tried and tried, but each time he wiped us pretty convincingly. If it wasn't Neit exploding, it was all the melee being Boomed, or Pax resonating into dust. We eventually had to retreat, soundly (heh) defeated.

Like Nazan before him, Murmur is right now being researched within an inch of his life, and can expect no mercy next time he meets the Children...

Haxrot the Initiate

Midnight's Children has its first new initiate - Haxrot, Blood Elf Paladin, already making a name for himself and for the Children. Welcome, and may the Dark Lady watch over you!

Razorfen Kaos

After a too long hiatus, the Brood re-emerged from their hibernation to tackle Razorfen Kraul, that maze of thorns and quillboar.

Denmother and her Brood

We were expecting a tough night, after dominating the last couple of runs. And it started out that way - we cleared the a corridor, but as we rounded the first corner we managed to pull the nearest mobs and a patrol. A rapid retreat out of the Instance saved the wipe. Our second attempt ended the same - run away!

A bit of LTP analysis followed - Haelo's pet Clash was a little out of control, often persuing her prey to the far end of the zone and returning with more denizens on her tail. And Xantir made a fashion statement that distracted everyone all night long.

Xantir's wearing...shorts

We eventually remembered how to play, and proceeded to romp around the Kraul in a pretty convincing fashion. Turns out the zone has been convincingly nerfed, so rather than the 33 elites we were expecting, we were facing down 28's. No problem for the Brood in full swing.

The only problem was calming Xantir down.

Doing it for the ladies

So we pretty much cleared it, though late on things fell apart when Dawn started attempting to take on the zone herself. Which led, in the end, to a wipe of sorts. So once again we're going to hold off on bestowing warmaster on Denmother. Her time will come, but not just yet.

Off to Scarlet Monastery next - perhaps finally for a challenge!

Arrived

After some soul searching, vigorous email discussion, and the release of The Combat Document (Take 2), the Elder geared up and ventured out to take on two instances in the same night - The Black Morass and The Mechanar.

Last time out the Morass broke our spirits a little (hence the soul searching) - it's a time based instance, with very little recovery time and bosses that just keep coming. It's cleverly designed to ratchet up the tension and pressure the further you progress, leading to frayed nerves late in the night.

But this time we dominated, despite Paxmortis being slightly off his game due to an accidental exposure to tofu shortly before the session. Blackheathen tanked and held each boss in his thrall, whilst Neitzsche healed beautifully, keeping not just Blackie but Fugg and Stroeb up for the entire fight. Fugg's hand-crafted axe of mass destruction helped. And Paxmortis, when he was alive, also did a brilliant job taking down wave after wave of Dragonkin.

Aeonus

Stroeb continued her run of drop wins, picking up one of the all-time great Rogue offhands - Latro's Shifting Sword. 1.4 weapon speed FtW. Just need to pick up its twin from MrT now... We also picked up a bunch of other stuff too.

Flushed with success, everyone but Blackheathen managed to die whilst innocently handing in the quests when we pulled approximately 800 crocolisks from the surrounding swampland. Still - that's not a wipe!

Our next stop was The Mechanar. And it has to be said, Stroeb and Paxmortis were almost beside themselves with excitement. For some reason running Mech felt like we had finally arrived. The endgame.

Thankfully we were masterfully led by Blackie, who has been running Mech with <shudder> PuGs! The ultimate test of a tank, no doubt. Neitzsche too had given that a go, and was still bearing the scars of the enormous pressure a PuG places on the healer.

And because of all that experience, we basically took the place apart. There was one small wipe, but that was down to exhuberance more than anything else - we were all having too much fun to bother with stuff like staying alive. After that hiccup, we downed everyone who crossed our path. And for Stroeb, the quality drops were almost getting embarrassing.

Mechano-Lord Capacitus

Gatewatcher Iron-Hand

To celebrate, once we'd finished we all ventured back to Thrallmar and took down one of the Big Guys...

Fel Falls

(If you look carefully, you'll see the Triangle of Death in action. Kind of like the Lakers' triangle offense, we deploy Blackheathen up front, whilst Fugg and Stroeb attack from behind in order to maximise the Combat Table. If none of this makes sense - read the Combat Doc!)

The reason

This is (one) reason why Seventy is worth it...

Freedom

Purp'

Forgot to mention that the Guild got it's first Purple drop the other night - the Elder picked up the pattern for the almighty Unyielding Girdle. wOoOt!