Two nights of playing and I'm more than adamant about the fact that it's all about gear and getting the right one. This may be a subjective and biased, but it's based on my current experience in the game.
Friday kicked off with another nice Ony10: isn't it sad to see the old girl go down week after week? This time the action was more contained and I felt like I could follow the flow of the encounter. Though I didn't feel I performed anywhere as well as in the first run... Maybe I was trying too hard to contain the whelps or something, because more got through my sieve than was supposed to. I noticed during this encounter that there is something awry in my UI or buttons, as my Challenging shout just wouldn't go off with one click.
Never the less, I got a nice trophy to change for a perfect trinket. And a great helmet to gem accordingly. Great run, both loot and entertainment wise.
As entertaining and fast the Ony run is, it is not enough to call it a night. So people pulled out a group for Obsidian Sanctum for the achievement Less is More: 8 man run in the 10 man content. Off we went, Laiskajaakko was off tanking the adds and it was a blast. Granted we downed the drakes first, so it was effectively a Sartharion without the drakes (Sarth+0), but still. This granted me with a nice bag to put my future super loot into, a memento to remember this one later on.
And after that the mandatory daily heroic and ToC5, both which were just a blast.
My friday night was so fun I was grinning the majority of the Saturday without understanding why myself. This caused a bit discomfort in the Kempo training, as the rest of the guys thought... well, they had their doubts about my sanity. As if there was anything to doubt about.
Sunday afternoon was yet another game session. I started out with doing the cooking daily and now I can Cook with Style (got my chef's hat), followed by getting the trinket from handing in the Head of Onyxia. The Purified Blood of Onyxia is excellent and for some peculiar reason I hadn't even noticed that it has a huge boost in the def: this caused the fact that I can easily switch at least two of my lower rated def gems to something 'more productive' ones, something I have to spend some time to think about. I was about to get the enchants to my new helm when I got into a guild run of VoA: again a new instance for me to experience.
I made two mental notes in this run. The first one was that I must start upgrading my dps set. This is because I was running the instance as dps because I had never been there and I had no clue on what is happening. Thankfully I had just started testing the Deus Vox Encounters boss addon, which actually told me where to move, what to avoid and when to expect the next nasty thing to land, so I was pretty much secured in that sense. The bosses fell one after another without deaths and by a stroke of luck I got a chestpiece to start building my dps set. That I took as a some sort of guidance from the game to take this endeavour seriously.
The second mental note I made in this run was to keep from meddling with my UI while in a run. You see, I tried to move the main tank bar in my UI before we launched on the second boss, but that bar got stuck to my mouse pointer!! I couldn't release it for one reason or another and thus I couldn't click on anything on screen, not even my action buttons. So the fight went by keyboard (well, I seldom use clicking anyhow, but I couldn't select the target either), while I was trying to find ways to release the bar.
The only solution was to reload UI, which mean't I missed the best part of the last boss fight, contributing only a minor part of the dps there.
Never mess with the UI while in an instance.
Long story short, we went through daily heroic in a group of four: we actually flew through Nexus and found some interesting ways to keep the healer occupied, and I got even more parts to my dps set... which even more felt like the game was trying to tell me something. This feeling was forced even more upon me as I went to turn in a quest in Wintergrasp (yes, Alliance was holding it still), where I first got my Black War Mammoth mount -I needed the fluff this time!- and noticed that there was only 2 minutes for the WG to start!
What a fight that was: I died only once during the whole fight, and that was only in the last minutes before the defence failed. Only because the game next to froze on my computer due to excessive amount of moving things on my screen. But it was fun and furious, and reminded me to check the other battlegrounds if they are anywhere as fun as this one. (I guess AV or AB could be even better as my machine might cope with the smaller amount of players better...)
After the WG ended I decided to head to Borean Tundra to complete the daily fishing quest (which had failed on me three times already: I hadn't caught any of the fishes from the Blood Pools for the Blood is Thicker quest, from three separate pools of blood), and started flying there through Sholazar Basin. My idea was to go along the rim to see if there are any mining nodes to use, and follow the 'shortest' route from SB to the fishing spot.
Sure there were nodes around. At the third one I landed only to notice a Tauren Warrior in there, just finishing the looting. And naturally I didn't realize I was in pvp mode after the WG...
It was the battle of the titans: this tauren was using a two hander, so he was in his dps spec and gear, while I was in my protection one. His strikes caused so much pain and misery, while mine were mere nuisance to him, but my damage mitigation was somewhat better than his. So the ebb and flow of the battle was pretty much on his side and finally Laiskajaakko kissed the ground while I was grinning and giggling madly.
Holy crap. I have to check the pvp side more closely.
And yes, get that dps set going for real.
It's all about gear, rather than skill: if I hadn't had the gear I currently have, I wouldn't have been able to attend to all the three raids I went in, I wouldn't have been able to perform in them the way I did and I wouldn't have felt good about what I was doing in them.
And if I had had the gear, I would have beaten that tauren warrior. I know I would!
