7,000 Done

Earlier today, after all dailies had been completed, I figured, let's go have some fun in the Eye of the Storm and try and get a few achievements. A few disappointing games later, I gave up there and decided, maybe Alterac Valley would treat me a bit nicer. I got into a nice fresh game, rode to the Snowfall graveyard, capped it, dropped down to the field of strife, found a poor little hordie there just ready to be destroyed and then moved ahead to Tower Point to cap that tower. That left me with defending a graveyard and defending a tower to complete Alterac Valley All-Star. I moved north a bit, tried to re-cap a tower the horde had taken, but another ally took it before I could hit the flag. I went south for a while, looking for a graveyard to defend, but found nothing there. After a while, the horde made their push north, capping graveyards, towers, and everything as they moved, but leaving them without defenders. It was my chance to strike! Quick, take the graveyard...easy. Now the tower - who knows what could be lurking inside...I had all my cooldowns ready to use, but ran into no resistance except for other allies following behind me ready to try and take the cap from me. But it was not to be! I would be the all-star on this day!

And with those 20 precious points...where am I now??

The only reason I made it to 7,000 with AV All-Star was because during last week's 10-man Ulduar run, we made some amazing time on our way to Thorim and we were able to engage him before Sif left him. I thought I would just get a nice little achievement and that would be it. We had no idea that Sif would then join the battle and make it a living hell for us. However, knowing that we could easily start the hard-mode, we gave it many more shots, but something little always went wrong - we'd lose a player in the arena for no good reason, I'd make a mistake on the gauntlet and die, or Sif would just cause us too much havoc. So unfortunately, we gave up on hard mode for the week so we could move on to Yogg, but I'm certain we can add Hodir hard-mode to our XT hard mode kill list.

Farewell Darklight

It is with much sadness that today I have left my guild of many years, DarkLight Resolution. But due to recent actions by the leader and his sidekick, I can no longer sit idly by as my good friends are slandered and spoken ill of.

It started innocently enough - a simple sidelining from the raid that could have been seen as time to improve and demonstrate a willingness to learn. Instead, it was turned into a personal attack - which it was never meant to be - and instead of being handled privately and with grace, it was blown out of proportion.

So as there were hurt feelings, we met to discuss the issues that were unresolved. We had thought at that point, more than a month ago, that the air was cleared and there was no remaining hostility.

However, earlier this week, the past was dredged up from the shadows and though everyone had moved on, one person apparently did not. And because of this selfish behavior, I can no longer serve under him as an officer of this fine guild.

I truly wish DarkLight the best. 99.8% of the people in the guild are some of the finest people I've had the pleasure of meeting in my travels. It's truly a shame that due to the actions of two, the guild has been torn apart, losing officers, generals, and citizens.

To my friend Eirama, if you happen to read this, I appreciate all your efforts to prevent this chasm from splitting the guild. It saddens me to leave you behind to pick up the pieces as I know that this cannot be easy on you. I wish you the best and I hope the guild can grow stronger from this.

[Edit July 28th - Comments have been disallowed]

The Push for 7,000

Last week, we accidentally got a couple achievements while doing heroic Ulduar, so my push towards 7,000 achievement points is going strong. It started on Ignis - I was on construct duty, so it was my job to blow up the constructs when they became brittle. However, one of them got out of my line of sight behind a fire pillar (I just lost track of it), so when the call was made, it was too late for me to go shatter it. Our awesome offtanks quickly picked it up again, made it brittle, and before you knew it, when I shattered one construct, the other one that had been awoken by Ignis was shattered as well. So there we had Heroic: Shattered.

We continued on and we reached Kologarn who refused to let us pass. Normally, we focus all DPS on the right arm and down him that way, but recently we've found that just as he's about to die, his left arm has been DPS'ed enough via incidental damage (swipes, consecrates, death and decays, etc.) that if we just add a bit of DPS to kill the arm, all that damage is transferred to Kologarn and he goes down quicker. So when I saw we were close to killing Kolo and I saw that his left arm was getting low, even when the right arm popped up, I focused DPS on the left arm, knowing the call to kill the left arm would come when the right arm went down. With the extra damage I was able to provide to the left arm before the right arm went down, we were able to get Heroic: Disarmed.

Then, last night, while fighting for control of Wintergrasp, I realized after all was said and done that I was just 8 honorable kills away from 5,000. So this morning, I headed out a little early to the Strand of the Ancients and quickly dispatched of 8 hordies to pick up 5,000 Honorable Kills

Of course, while striving for achievements, I'm still doing my Crusader dailies each and every day (actually, Saturday was the first time since the patch that I didn't get my dailies done - ale comes first). A day before though, while out there, I found my evil twin! Finneal (achievement comparison) was there and he looked almost exactly like me! Just with more achievement points! I can't let that stand. But we did have some fun and we both popped our mirror images just to confuse some people and seeing eight little dopplegangers running around was a sight to be seen.

Lastly, last night, I went into a quick VOA since I really didn't have anything else to do and even though I don't need any items from there, it was fun to do single target DPS. Usually in Ulduar, I have to do crowd control, DPS some bomb bots, or just do things that don't allow me to go all out. Well, on both Emalon and Archavon I was pretty much free to do as much DPS as I could and it showed. I easily topped the damage meters and was quite happy with my performance. And all of this was done without an enchant on my purty new Runescribed Blade.

Emalon:

Archavon: