Sometimes, you've just got to kill penguins.

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Two days ago, I was at the meeting. Everyone was gathered in a circle in the center of the room. When it was my turn to speak, I proudly proclaimed, “My name is Baluki, and I’m a WoWaholic. (“Hi Baluki”) It has been 5 months since I last played.” Applause. But now it’s all undone. Yesterday, I reactivated my account.

That’s a lie, of course. My name isn’t really Baluki, and I don’t think I was ever addicted to WoW. I can quit any time I want to, dammit! I stopped playing because I was bored with doing dailies and because I didn’t have time to do dungeons anymore.

But I felt like playing again to test out the new Dungeon Finder, which I’ve heard is very good. And it is. Oh, how it is. Yesterday, I stepped into Trial of the Champion, Halls of Lightning, and Utgarde Pinnacle for the first time, and blew through them all easily. Once I was sure that my skills (such as they are) were still intact (and of course they are – I’ve been playing this game for 5 years) I jumped into The Nexus on Heroic mode.

Four dungeons in 3 hours. FOUR! This Dungeon Finder is amazing. Especially the random dungeon mode. The worst part about doing dungeons previously was just finding a group. “Hey, do you want to do a dungeon?” “Oh sure, which one?” “How about X?” “Nah, not that one.” “Do we have a tank?” “No.” [Three hours pass.] “Hey, I found a healer. But he wants to bring his undergeared rogue friend.” “Well, maybe I’ll hop on my Death Knight and try to tank.” Bleh.

I’m going to be playing a lot more often now.

 

Unfortunately, at this time I have no guild, and most of my old friends are gone – quit, or transferred. Fortunately I saw Heif and Rev on last night, and I hope it’s still them playing their characters. I’m trying to get a friend of mine to stop server-hopping and settle on mine, so we’ll see how that goes.

Here’s my model viewer, in case you want to see how horrible my gear is. Yes, I’m rocking the dungeons in PvP gear.

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Remember when I used to just post screenshots on this blog? Here's a throwback to olden days.

Here's a pile of kobolds I (and, um, that prot paladin) killed while we were clearing out our mine in AV. One thing I can't stand about AV is how people always forget about defending the mines after they've been captured. Eventually, some opposing rogue or feral drood will come along and capture it. I usually end up going back to recap it, but I really suck at killing rogues (and they excel it killing ME).

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Frequent readers of this blog may know that I don't get to do dungeons nearly as much as I'd like to, due to the fact that I rarely have a couple hours of uninterrupted time to play. However, lately I've been throwing caution to the wind and grouping up when I normally wouldn't.

And so, this week I finally got into THREE dungeons that I've never been in before: Shattered Halls, Black Morass (aka Dark Portal), and Steamvaults.

My two SH runs were phenomenal. I ran with a couple guildies who happen to be decked out in Tier 5 gear, a Prot Pally and some sort of Warrior. And let me tell you, Prot Pally tanking in SH is the way to go. He would run through the area, aggroing 2+ groups at a time, and he held them like glue. I love it when I can blast Chain Lighting like a lunatic, and at the end of the first run I got the Tidefury shoulders, which made my CL even more powerful.

My two Steamvaults runs were a lot of fun too. That's definitely one of my favorite dungeons right now. I got to kill a lot of gnomes, get another piece of my Karazhan key (which I thought was in Black Morass) and picked up the Scintillating Coral Band.

Before all of that however, I got into a Black Morass group. I've gotta say, I really don't like that one. It's completely unlike the other dungeons; it's basically just "Guard the VIP" in the middle of a wide-open space. It was a nightmare for me, because I can't produce the DPS necessary without going OOM. And to top it off, we wiped 3 times and only downed the first boss. But I'm ready for another try now, but only because I've got to for my Karazhan key. I got a ton of MP5 gear so I'll last longer, and patch 2.3 is coming tomorrow, so I'll have better mana efficiency/regen too. Once I get my KZ key, I'll probably never go back there.

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My guild hit the two World Bosses today. This is the first time I've been in a raid since a few weeks before BC came out.

The thing I missed most was having all those people there, beating on the same target. Things can go wrong in a second, and one boss can kill half your raid in an instant.

On both fights, we killed the boss on our second attempt. I died on the first Earthquake in our first Doomwalker attempt; I didn't realize that the Earthquake could do 8000 dmg to you, or that I could easily stay out of its range. Let's hear it for researching the fight beforehand.

The Kazzak fight was a lot easier, at least to me. I killed him countless times back when he was just a lvl. 60 boss before BC, and they didn't change the fight at all (that I'm aware of) besides upping his damage output and hit points. We wiped once because a bunch of people died (I think someone let their mana go too low) but the second time we only had one death.

Neither boss dropped loot that I could use. Oh well. It was still a lot of fun, and I hope I can get back into raiding some day soon.

I died almost immediately on our first Doomwalker attempt.


Rawr!

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This is basically the closest I'll ever get to Illidan.

Once you reach Exalted with the Netherwing, you get a quest to meet Illidan himself. Well, an image of him, anyway. He of course sees right through your simple disguise and is about to zap you, but you're rescued by a nearby dragon-in-disguise (Yarzil the goblin, on the far left) who flies you AT RUNNING SPEED all the way across Shadowmoon, across Terokkar, into Shattrath. Takes about 15 minutes, and nothing happens during that time. Awesome quest, but the flight needs work.

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I'm just glad I was one of the ones *creating* the pile, not cleaning it up.

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I feel like I'm really behind. I fought Murmur for the first time last weekend. We dropped him on our first try. I got the first piece of my Karazhan key.

He's kinda cool looking (though I've seen Ragnaros and Thunderaan before), and the "sound wave" visual effects are neat, but what really impressed me were all the different sound effects in the fight. They were completely unlike anything else in the game, and they were also somewhat disorienting (which I thought was really cool). Lots of weird squeals and stuff.

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Rexxar is 100% badass.

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This was pretty interesting. Kruul is a guy who appears at the entrance to one of the capital cities at random, and he's exactly the same as Kazzak, except that he has a bunch of (weak!) corehounds with him. (And don't get me started on why the Fire Elementals would never ally with the Burning Legion.) The problem though, is that it's right next to the UC entrance, and there are tons of people who've never done the Kazzak fight coming and going, and they like to stand around and spectate while Kruul is being fought, which means they're easily killed, which heals Kruul, which means they can't kill him in 3 minutes, which means he kills everyone within about 100 yards of him instantly.

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My first Maexxna kill, from last night. Funny how frequently I miss our FIRST kills. This was our third, I think.

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At last, the beast lies dead at my feet.

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Nobody can resist making "anatomy" jokes when talking about Ouro.

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Well, we finally killed the eye-covered monstrosity at the end of AQ40. Man, it feels good.

Unfortunately, I was rotated out to give another shaman more experience in the fight, so I missed the kill. But I was there when we got him down to 3%, so hopefully that's proof enough for ya.

I'll have a real killshot up some time this week when we kill him again.

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...and bagged her! I think it was our 5th or 6th try too.

It's a pretty quick fight (4 mins), but it wasn't particularly interesting from a Shaman standpoint. For nearly the entire fight, I couldn't do anything but whack my Decurse button because she's got an insane poison bolt attack. I guess the priests got to do some mind control though.

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We defeated Eranikus in Moonglade to complete the Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest for one of our guild members. This was a pretty impressive fight. The first time we tried it, we were helping Darkfire (an Alliance guild). They had a full raid, we had a full raid, and we wiped on it.

This time, it was just our raid, another 10 people or so, and a good strategy, and we bagged him on our first try. In fact, we had him below 20% by the time Tyrande showed up (you've just gotta fight him until she shows up, and then she casts a spell to make him good again).

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Not much to tell. I participated in my first kill in Naxxramas today. We downed Anub'Rekhan, which the guild has been doing for several weeks now, but I finally got a chance today.

I don't really know what was going on. The tanks had him completely under control, so all I did were the things always do in a fight: heal, drop totems, and lag.

Oh, and apparently there's a...ahem...bug with the bug model. He's probably the coolest-looking character in the game, but right now he shows up as being entirely black.

Hey, if anyone at Blizzard reads this, the Draenor server REALLY needs some attention. I got disconnected at least 8 times tonight (we did BWL too), and since the new patch was released, I've been getting numerous DC's each night. Never had it happen more than once a month previously.

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I direct your attention to the RaidStatus window, just to the left of a dead Vael.
(Lag has been terrible since the stupid cross-server battlegrounds thing was implemented; he's usually a very easy fight for us.)

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Participated in my first Twin Emperors kill.

Yes, this is the BEST image I could take. And when they're dead, they're on opposite sides of the room too (because you have to keep them far from each other), so there's really no way to get a good shot that doesn't involve an eventual raid wipe.

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After just 4 attempts (one of which bombed because of lag, and one where we got him down to 3%) we downed Fankriss. He's got a pretty weird death pose.

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