SoO HC is where its at currently. The main prize is heirlooms from Garrosh, with the 100% drop rate for your spec, before they get removed from the loot table.

I now have a bow on Zionxi and a mace on Lilouann which suits me fine. As they are going to be the only two that I’m going to push to lvl 100, the rest can get there in their own sweet time.

As I’m writing this I’m drinking a beer and thinking about the things that have gone on this week. With the new patch it meant that our roster to do Mythic/old HC needed to double in size.  Gone are the 10 man days. People have also come and gone.  Some to pastures new, some to focus on real life.

With the flexibility in the new HC we can bring as many as want to come along to our shindigs. Which is handy. Theres also no longer a restriction on participation if you have already killed a boss, you can now come along and just forgo loot (like LFR).

Speaking of LFR this brings us nicely to our raiding on Thursday. First raid after reset we set off in the hunt for our last bits of gear that would tide us over. Now it was more of something to do together, on alts or mains, something to keep the fun there while we wait out the final few weeks of Pandaria.

 

We started off from the beginning. I went in alone and faced the trash. Pet on growl I started the attack. 85k health… easy. Well it was kinda. I died after pulling four of them and had a sympathetic “Oh Ella” over TS from Rawls. Everyone piled in and I pointed to the one I had managed to kill.
“Is this Normal?” Nullflow asked.
“No, HC” Rawls replied.
“Oh, it said normal…”
“Ella you muppet, you’ve got it on Normal! Everyone out!”

Resetting the instance we set to work, we went back in and the 80k health had gone up to 116k. “This is more like it!”

We cleared or way to the boss, during the split phase the blobs went down very quickly.
“I’d hate to have to try and do that blob achievement now”
“Some of us don’t have it…” Rawls replied.
“Hah who?”
“Me”
“Don’t you? Oh dear…”

Moving on to Norushen, after dispatching the Protectors, this boss is now as buggy as hell. As the screen shot at the top shows. This is what I saw while I was in the orb realm. I saw everything and everyone. My ‘Tear Reality’ was spawning on top of people so not only did I have to move, so did everyone else. The first time this happened I didn’t kill a single thing and got out completely free of corruption and the large add had already spawned. It confused me and everyone else in the raid. Even though the dps phase was borked our rowdy bunch of alts (peppered with a few mains) made it through.

Sha was a mess. For the first two waves of the debuff, not one of the healers had Gift of the Titans so that was half the raid dead. Second attempt was a lot cleaner. Blizzard decided to make it up to us and it was dispels a go-go.

Through the portal to Ogrimmar, somehow I managed to land in the galley of the boat rather than on the deck. It was a better situation than when, many moons ago, I landed in the water and ended up swimming my way to the shore (and then nearly ran over a mine)
With the nerf on the health pools of the bosses and trash, Galakras is no longer a race to the end and now pretty much a spectator sport. It’s now a boss where you want it to go down quickly but Blizzard say ‘No.’ and force you to stand there. The waves go down very quickly and you’re left making your char jump around so that you don’t fall asleep at your keyboard. You have to be quick on your toes to realise that the demolisher is nearly dead by the time it parks up and the bosses at the top of the towers don’t have a chance to do their cone attacks before they’re also face down in the dusty rooftops of Ogrimmar.

The loot piñata that is Juggers was next. We managed to kill a couple of people (again) but it was no real bother.
The fun began with the Dark Shamans. We put up markers for our run positions. We had two tanks so we would have to contend with everything on the lower floor. I was healing so as my calling of positions started off well it fell into just yelling at the tanks when they were or if range. Then the blobs came. And there were many deaths. We wiped up and started again.
“Just make sure you’re in range and move out of the blobs” Blunnerz interjected.
We started again. We had the ashen walls everywhere they shouldn’t be. We managed to navigate our way around the majority of them until somehow both Blunnerz and I got penned in by them on the path up the slope.
“Errrr. Are we trapped?” I asked, hoping that I’d overlooked an escape route.
“Yeah we are!” Blunnerz laughed.
I couldnt help it but I started giggling uncontrollably. The only two healers and we had both managed to get stuck while the remaining group ran away from us and everything that the bosses were throwing at them.
We had managed to make every mistake we could, so this time they were going down.
This attempt wasn’t clean either. Clearly we had never gone back to this boss for a reason. Starting off well and moving when we needed to. I had balls on the right tank when they remembered to call out they were swapping! Out of my for eyes (I wear glasses) I had one eye on what was going on near me and the other three on the raid grid. I had to rely on people moving when they should and to the right marker.
We did get one wall to spawn in a building and we all made ‘ooooh!’ noises at it. We felt like we had won at WoW.
There was more enthusiasm for the wall than when the bosses both went face down into the mud. (Why have the Horde created a shanty town for their main city? The Blood Elves live in splendour, the Taurean have manicured lawns and pretty paintwork, even the Undead have a pretty nice city to ‘live’ in. The Orcs? Let’s make things out of sticks and scrap metal…)

Anyway. There were some important lessons to be learnt.
Don’t trap your healers like sheep in a pen.
Don’t leave it so long before doing a boss again.
Don’t expect your alts to do exactly why you can on your main (every time the blobs went down, a little voice in my head was begging for me to push my Barrage button)

there are screen shots which I will dig up. Once I’m back from having a coffee…