Maly 25: Take 1

Last night, I got my first chance to step into the heroic Eye of Eternity. Parts of our "Gold Team" joined up with parts of Aenador's "Team 2" to see if we could destroy Malygos. After a few tries getting the death knights comfortable in their roles, and getting Phases 2 and 3 down pat, we almost downed Maly, getting him to 4% before he enraged and wiped the raid. On our next attempt, we had more drakes up during Phase 3, but had spent too much time in Phases 1 and 2, so again he enraged. Our last attempt was pretty ugly, but we now know that he is beatable by our group. If we bring in just a little more DPS and have more people practice the Aces High! daily, we should have no problem next week.

In other happenings, I joined up with Aenador's team over the weekend to conquer Serpentshrine Cavern. I wasn't able to fish up the Lurker for the achievement, but I was finally able to kill Vashj and get her vial for my quest. I was hoping to get the Hand of A'dal title because I had obtained the starter quest before they removed the title, but apparently with Wrath, no one is able to achieve the title, no matter when they picked up the quest.

We then went on, quickly cleared Tempest Keep and Zul'Gurub, and next week we plan on going into Hyjal and the Sunwell. Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep really were a joke for our group as we didn't really have to worry about any boss mechanics as our DPS would just destroy them before they had a chance to do anything. It was fun, but a shame I never got to see SSC or TK at normal levels to really learn the boss fights. I mean, I knew the Lurker and Hydross, but we never got further, so I never saw Vashj or Morogrim at full strength (or any boss in TK). Kind of sad.

On another note, 3.1 was released to the PTR today and news is flowing in constantly. I'll see if I have time later to post my thoughts. All I can say right now is, yay for more pets and more achievements.

Random Thoughts

• The past few days, I've been hanging out in a channel on our server called Bookclub. With their help, I've been able to gather 7 of the 8 books required for Higher Learning. I even took lead of the channel for a while on Saturday night and Sunday as I kept the timers updated and coordinated camping of books by people in the channel. Suffice to say, I really haven't had as much fun outside of raiding for a while. The thrill of the hunt, the camaraderie, it was quite a fun experience. Hopefully tonight I can get my last book and my newest pet and while it'll be sad to leave the channel, I hope my contributions made over the past few days were helpful to the community.
  
• Today is patch day. And with it, I will be getting my Hail to the Chef and Chef de Cuisine achievements. Lately I haven't been sporting any title as they all seem to be pretty commonplace and boring these days. I'm hoping to get Champion of the Frozen Wastes this week if we can down Malygos, but if we don't, or at least until that point, I'll be Chef Tiddlywinks.
  
• Speaking of achievements, leading up to last weekend, I went 6 days without an achievement! SIX! I was stuck at 4,500 achievement points for the longest time. Luckily I've gotten back on track with some heroic achievements, some reputation achievements, some battleground achievements, and even some old school achievements. So now I'm up to 4,620 achievement points and with the Lunar Festival coming Saturday, I should blow by 4,800 with the holiday and profession achievements.
  
• Speaking of Old School raiding...last night we went into Tempest Keep for the achievement. I joined a little late, getting there just in time for High Astromancer Solarian and we easily blew through her and the trash up to Kael'thas before running into trouble. One of the main issues we ran into was our Death Knight tank and off tank. Neither can use a shield so the fireballs and pyroblasts were eating us up. Luckily we were able to make it through a couple times, but then he'd start throwing us around and just doing too much damage to the tanks. So we called in reinforcements. We added another 10 people to our group and with 21, we downed him (a mix of levels from 70-80). In the end, just 6 of us were standing and my heart was pounding like none other. Sitting there, trying my damnedest to nuke him down and get those last few points off his health...it's a shame my damage meter and timers broke during an update right before I logged in - it would have been interesting to see what my damage was like on that fight - I certainly love seeing strings of 10k+ crits. In the end, it was me and 5 others left alive that defeated him. And with that, I earned my acheivement, got Kael's Vial Remnant for The Vials of Eternity, and I should still have a shot at my Hand of A'dal title since I've been carrying around the quest for ages. I also screwed up the rolls at the end which I felt horrible for, but I did walk away with my first and only tier 5 piece, the Robes of Tirisfal.
  
• I'm a bit miffed with one of the changes in the patch today. They're going to be awarding full reputation gains for grey mobs. So what does this mean? Well, I've spent countless hours killing furlbogs, trolls, and undead to get my 32 exalted reputations. Now, anyone and everyone can go back to these old rep grinds and level them 5 times faster than I was able to. It will make all my hard work completely worthless. Even though I know I did the grinds before the patch, no one else will, and we'll suddenly start seeing a lot more people exalted with a lot more factions. On the bright side, I could probably finish up my Zandalar rep a bit quicker now with fewer gold invested in coins and bijous, but that's the only place it benefits me while everyone else will have easy grinds for the Argent Dawn, Bloodsail Buccaneers, Timbermaw, Zandalar, Kurenai, Sporeggar, etc.