Spinal Tapped

On the eve of the 10% Dragon Soul raiding buff tomorrow night, it gives me great satisfaction that our 10man raid group managed to sever Deathwing's spine today with only the 5% buff up.

We had been working on Ultraxion prior to the 5% buff and just missed killing him with our own power - I'm pretty sure 1 week's worth of gear upgrades for people would have done it - so the kill on Spine was some great timing.

Not to mention, we managed both Blackhorn (a fight we were still a little shaky on) and Spine without Bloodlust, since we had no shaman/mage and our raid leader was confident that we could do it without, even though I've usually volunteered to switch to BM for Ancient Hysteria in the past.

Hunter note about Spine: It seems to take at least 3-4 Arcane shots (less if you get an auto/Chimaera/insta-Aimed in there) to break Fiery Grip, so doing less DPS but keeping a full bar of Focus ready is important, especially when you have to break someone out close to Rolling or Tendon phase.

It'd be interesting to try the fight as BM - with the lower personal DPS it might be more difficult to break people out quickly, even though you'd have better burst DPS available for killing Tendons.

Hooray for off-peak hours

Not really something I expected to get until much later when the hype died down (at least, not without a team of dedicated followers or something!), but I guess doing it at midnight (6am server time) helped quite a lot - I managed to get Gurubashi Arena Grand Master the same way, not to mention more than a few rare spawns.

I have to admit, although it makes PuGging old content (or even new content!) harder being on a non-Oceanic server, it does have its advantages :)

Transmogrification Gallery

I love the new Transmogrification Screenshot Gallery Blizzard finally put up. As I expected, I didn't like the tier sets as much as the character outfits that people have put together - some of them are quite creative, like a dwarven miner, Stormwind guard, handyman or farmer etc.

Some of my favourites:

Male BE as Thor (the Marvel character)
Human female as Jaina (why can't we get anywhere close to Sylvanas' outfit in-game but you can pretty much replicate Jaina?)
Human female as a "Dark Man" (with flaming weapons)
NE female hunter that managed a random yellow outfit to match the Skyfire Hawk-Bow

Achievement Hunting

...and Druid-ing, and Priest-ing... because soon, Achievements will be account-wide and I'll be able to do them on my alts instead of my hunter.

Really not ideal, because I'd really rather do all Achievements on my hunter if possible... but being on a non-Oceanic server, plus being a DPS, unfortunately does limit what PuGs you can find for old content.

At least now I'll have a chance to get into PuGs if I offer to heal - or even tank, if I absolutely have to - because for retro runs, having slightly under-par gear doesn't usually matter as much.

Not to mention, camping for rares will be that much easier on low population servers, although I'm pretty much done with that now.

Either way, I'm sure altaholics will be ecstatic about this change in MoP!

Dragon Sorrows

The thing I'm finding most annoying about Dragon Soul at the moment: when the cooldown for Heroic Will goes off and you still cop a death on Ultraxion. Stupid latency :(