Given the disasterous results of last year’s family gathering in Southshore, we decided to have this years’ in the safety of our own home. I’m just thankful that we got dear Fai back, even if there were a few unexpected changes.

It’s been an eventful year for us all, with a few surprises here and there, but through it all we’ve kept each other in our hearts and minds whenever possible. If you have family, remember that not everyone does – but if we’re very lucky, we’ll find one anyway. My family, as diverse as it is, is still my family, and I’m glad for every one of them.

To celebrate, we gather together and feast and enjoy each others’ company. We all decided to get gussied up for the Feast of Winter’s Veil, although Kutath lost his fancy duds when The Exodar crashed, and he hadn’t gotten around to getting replacements (and believe me, it’s not easy finding fancy duds to fit a fully grown male Draenai!).  He took it in good humor, though. Well, here’s looking forward to next year’s gathering.

Here’s a little something from us to you to commemorate the occasion. Thanks for coming by, and we hope to see you again! Best wishes for the new year from Grimmtooth, Jasra, Floramel, Illume, Faiella, Slithmere, Kutath, Orlee, Amusmoses, and Yarley!

With the Name Change feature, it’s possible to lose track of people in your Friends List in-game. Who’s that “Squiggish” person, and why is he or she in my flist, anyway?

Here’s a little trick to help keep track: use the “note” feature to record the original name you friended them under.  There will still be plenty of room for other stuff, as needed. It’s no guarantee you’ll remember the person, but at least you’ll have a better chance.

Well, after many many tries and wipes, today we went in and three-shot Maly as the weekly raid boss, and many of us popped [Champion of the Frozen Wastes] in the process. We’re such noobs, half of us didn’t know where the loot was. Bring in the flying gimmick, and we’re not exactly at our best.

We followed this up with a not very successful attempt on Marrowgar-10; I think our Boomkin ditched us out of disgust.  Or maybe I’m reading too much into the sudden without warning drop.  /shrug – know what, I don’t care. He can go do that, and as soon as a replacement is available for me, he can go do that without bothering me about it.

Marrowgar is a confusing fight; even with him scaled back to 10-man strength, the whirlwind is devestating.  We need a lot more practice.  Disc healing isn’t exactly useful at that point, either.

The one good thing I saw was that my T9 2-piece bonus really makes the Frisbee stand tall.

The scary thing for me with regard to T9 and T10 is that Blizz is pushing Crit down so hard for the healing sets. Crit is a Big Deal™ for Disc healers. We get some from primary stats, which do get stacked, but the loss of Crit is going to hurt. The mace that dropped off of Maly was biased in the same way. This brings up some really interesting gear decisions.

If you’re working on that Loremaster achievement, WoWHead has added a new wrinkle to the WoWHead Profiler that absolutely rocks – namely, you can see any quests you have yet to complete, in any zone.

However, Admiral Akbarr says it’s a trap! And it is, to an extent, because it forces you to get a WoWHead account to install and run the WoWHead client, so they get all that nommy in-game data, and that makes WoWHead even MORE accurate! The bastards!

So, you make the call.  I’ve been running the client for quite some time now. It’s unobtrusive, and it’s nice to contribute to a database which I use so extensively.

Our GM spent weeks brute-forcing the achievement, and got it mere days ago.  I’m staying low for a while.

Been very quiet around here, lately, and for that I apologize. It all started with that bad ToC10 and got worse with the semi-fail Ulduar that followed. There is a certain bit of healer burnout in the air, and until I face that down here, I don’t think I can write about anything else.

So, burnout.

Actually, it’s escalated from healer burnout to raiding burnout. I’m of a mind not to raid.

There. I said it.

I’m not talking about healing. I’m talking about raids, in general.

I’ve asked the GM to find a replacement. We have several DPS peeps dual specced to heal, and we can fill in DPS more easily than healz, any day. Do the math.

This is not an effort to get Grimm or Flora into raids. Quite the contrary. I desire to be done with the entire framework of raiding. More precisely, being an officer in the guild during raids … taxes me. It taxes the GM, too, but she made her own life choices. This is mine.

We might even PvP to prove the point.

Note: I will not abandon my friends. Until a recplacement is available, for now, I will fulfill my implicit obligations. For now.

OK, that’s it for that. As big an element it is, I still don’t want to dwell on it.

Moving on.

-=-=-=-=-

Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about what’s happening in-game. For, beyond my traitorous desires to just play the game and have fun, I do have loyalty to what we do as a guild.

1. Ulduar progression is coming along. We were dead-ended for a while because we couldn’t go more than a certain amount of time, and that got us as far as Auri. This week we got that far on the first night, and the second night we got a substitute tank to come in (our Warr tank had GF aggro) and she walked us not only through Hodir but Thorim as well. More on these in a moment.
2. The ICC five-mans have been thoroughly roflstomped by our core raiders in standard mode, and we got the first instance done in Heroic by accident with no sweat.
3. Ony can still stomp us hard if we don’t do it right. For whatever reason, the last attempt failed in Phase 2 every time. Part of it appears to be that some people were not following instructions and focus firing on the same target as everyone else. There were points where I just said “fine, you’re going down, I’ll heal the ones that are where they are supposed to be.” And naturally, I ran into deep breaths myself, too. Overall, bad deal.
4. ICC 10 was attempted on the 2nd night – with Marrowgar at 25-man strength. As you can guess, we wiped as many people did. If I must raid, I’m interested in seeing how we fare now that they’ve adjusted him.

-=-=-=-=-

Back to Hodir / Thorim. Both of these fights require a ferocious amount of group healing. The MT is hardly taking any damage, usually, so the hardest part is keeping everyone else up and alive, and our Shammi is hard pressed to do so. We actually had our boomkin druid swap to tree as well.

I finally found a good use for my talents though. I focused on two tanks and two healers as my priorities, and they focused on everyone else. Seemed to work. Maybe in the future I’ll just swap to shadow for those fights, and let the tree and shammi keep us alive.

-=-=-=-=-

Two new members of the clan on other servers.

First, Grimmtooth the Third – who was rolled on Kael’Thas for the Raid for the Cure charity drive – has renamed to Dvorkin¹. If you are on K’T and care for such things, there ya go. Also, LFG. My sweetie is there as well so I am looking for a very casual guild here.  In the time since RftC I have advanced to level 33 without trying too hard, and given sufficient impetus, could be 80 in a very short time. I’ve done it before.

Second, Yardiff Bey – or more properly, Yardifbey – on Bronzebeard is my Belf flower-picking Warlock toon, recently hitting level 11. I rolled him to hang with my sweetie who is in DotH on that server. Also LFG as my sweetie’s guild will not admit non-female members. So I’m on mah own.

-=-=-=-=-

Okie. For good or for ill, silence is broken. We all apologize for this, regardless of who “we” is at the time.

Ooooooh. And it’s published. I’m committed.

1. ”Dworkin” was taken, but if you follow my pet naming convention, this makes perfect sense. If not, I recommend to you the collected works of Roger Zelazny as an example of some of the finest fantasy and SF you are likely to encounter for quite some time. [↩]