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!)