PVE: Raptor Hate (Or, Catharsis)

I really, really, REALLY hate raptors. There are actually seven of them in this shot because they have an aggro radius that puts Murlocs to shame. And, ignore the guy in the party. He was three zones over, and we were only partied to talk. That carnage was all me. And it took FOREVER.

Hate. Hate hate hate hate hate....

PVE: Most Effective Quest Pairing Ever

Okay. Take a good look at that screenshot-- I mean, click and follow it through to the large version. What you're probably going to notice first is Rastel having what appears to be a mild stroke with Indy staring on condescendingly, but that's not really the reason why I posted this.

What I'm calling your attention to is the mass of bodies on the hill. The corpses there are what remains of two Tunnelers, two Stonescythe Alphas, and three Stonescythe Whelplings, most of which were level 63 (and are dead under the Tunneler corpses). All of them aggro'd at once. The Tunnelers spit poison, the Alphas punt and can become temporarily invincible, and the Whelplings hamstring and cause bleed damage.

So what you're really looking at is the wake of destruction left after Rastel and I finished with them. You can't tell from the screenshot, but we are both at near full health and half mana. Neither of us used potions or were Innervated.

Yes, we are -that- good.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. An adequately geared restoration druid and retribution paladin are nigh unstoppable if they know how to play their classes well. We've been duoing elites and taking on huge clusters of mobs in Outland, and the only time we've died has been at the hand of opportunistic Horde. I heal and debuff, Rastel AoE tanks, enemies drop like flies. And, when outside I can be ridiculously effective at crowd control (once he learned how not to destroy my roots or wake my sleepers). If for some reason I run out of mana, I can pop into bear form and Rastel heals himself while I work up enough rage for a bear heal. By the time that's off, I'm back at full mana and ready to go for round two.

And, in the rare case that we bite off more than we can chew, he can bubble and run, and I can auto-root and cheetah form.

Nigh unstoppable, bitches.

PVE: The Ultimate Baron Run

This is a memory from a while back, so forgive me if the details are becoming fuzzy. I shall try to recount it as well as I can. There was a two-week-long period where I was doing nothing but Strathholme Baron runs incessantly because I was desperately attempting to get my ->Wildheart Kilt<-. Every single time I went, either Shadowcraft or Lightforge would drop. I remember one run where we were stuck with the worst pally I had ever been exposed to. He couldn't type, couldn't heal, couldn't fight, let me die twice...and got his lucking Lightforge piece at the end of the run.

Well, I was ranting violently to Himitsu about this, and he threw together a pickup group (this was in the days when the LFG channel still existed and had not yet gone global). I came along to heal, though I was still bitter about the entire instance and suspicious of everyone in the group. One of them was going to do something dumb-- it was an inevitability. Keep a few things in mind: Himitsu was the only one of the ten I had seen or played with before, and we were not on Ventrilo, so all communication was done in party chat. This was pure PUG, people.

Well, I was dead wrong about my predicted idiocy. No one died, no one aggrod accidentally, and we never stopped-- everyone knew EXACTLY what they were doing, so my mana regen was always enough for us to go without stopping. We had three rogues that knew how to not pull aggro from our tanks, two warlocks who were crowd controlling like nobody's business, and a shadow priest who knew to let me be the main healer, yet also knew when support was needed. No drink breaks, no AFKs to go get stoned, nothing. Everyone was friendly, intelligent, and pleasant. We get to the Baron before my first Gift of the Wild spell had worn off. That's right. The entirety of Strat up till the Baron in under an hour. Baron went down on the first go in record time (5 minutes), my kilt dropped, and we hearthed.

Repair costs? Less than five silver. Needless to say, my shrieks of joy woke up my roommate.

PVE: Ultimate SM glitch

So I was running Sfirot, Blacklight, and Kvasha through SM today with Rantel. Rantel had to go because she got too busy, so she didn't get to see the most amazing instance glitch I have ever seen. I've had some pretty odd things happen to me in Zul'Farrak, but this one took the cake.

We're at the Arcanist Doan, Library side. We've just cleared the room before him when all the sudden Kvasha drops before he can even get a shield off. Three mobs bring him down. We kill the mobs, Kvasha releases and goes back to the beginning of the instance, and I head back to get him and bring him back, just in case anything goes wrong.

And Lordy, did things ever go wrong. As I'm running back, four guys respawn at once on me. So I drop the melee, take out the ranged ones who were making the battle more difficult, turn around....and witness the entire instance respawn as one. It was like watching a bag of popcorn EXPLODE. And it wasn't like we waited too long to clear the instance and they started respawning slowly in the order we killed them. I turned around, blinked, and THERE ALL OF THEM WERE. Including, I believe, the ones I had just killed, but I was too busy cursing in Ventrilo to be sure.

So then something happens and Sfirot manages to aggro a roomful mobs, which all make a beeline, as one entity, to me, collecting more adds as they ran. It was like by their powers combined they became the Red Snake of Vengeance and slithered towards me, laughing maniacially. And I am pretty positive that -every single one- of them was a Scarlet Monk. Once these guys hit me, I knew it was over. My instant heal was already down, as was my bear form healing, and I knew when they ran they'd draw more adds before I could kill them. So I went down at the hands of roughly sixteen mid-thirty elites. I was drowning in tabards. It was fists as far as the eye could see.

So now I can say I had an instance reset while I was in it, when we were at the boss room.

I am so very bitter.