A Smattering of Summer Stuff

Ah summer. Warm weather has finally returned to the high desert. What does this mean? Why, a much greater urge to actually go outside and do something. I'm really looking forward to summer this year as my child is finally of an age to truly get out there and have summer fun either with us right there or mostly by himself. We got him one of those cheap little plastic pools that he's been filling up under the end of the slide and having hours of fun bombing down into. The garden is exploding with fresh produce for the table. I'm even starting to get out on my bike on a mostly regular basis. I don't expect I'll be getting back to riding multiple centuries by the end of this year, but it would be nice to feel comfortable rolling out in the 50-75 mile range on occasion. But enough about all those 'real life' activities.

Midsummer festival sure has reinvigorated my desire to get on some toons each evening instead of just for raiding. Most of my alts on the main server have been languishing, unloved, even forgotten, for quite a while now. The lock is the only one that's seen any love lately, and that was just to finally finish the push to 80 on him. However, with the chance for 2 easy frost from Ahune every day (and kudos to Blizz for making that such an easy proposition through LFG) I've been making an effort to get on each 80 most nights for that, if not dropping in for a random heroic to boot. I was not particularly looking forward to throwing myself to the random hounds on a regular basis again, but I must admit that almost all of the runs I've done this last week have been quite painless, sometimes even fun. I have to admit that I couldn't agree more with one of 3B's posts about Ahune. It's simply astounding the level of stupidity I had to put up with on Ahune the first handful of days. It's truly like players these days haven't got a clue how to adapt to a new fight without having it all handed to them. A few get it, and admittedly most seem to have figured it out by the fourth day or so. Those first couple of days were simply insane though. I had to laugh for the most part, especially when watching people in their T10/ICC25 gear floundering about. I mean, sweet Elune, on the second day of the festival I had an Ahune run take more time (5 wipes that I couldn't walk away from because I was laughing so hard at 3 peeps that started by bragging about their gearscores and then proceeded to let me, the healer, get abused over and over) than the follow up Occulus run I participated in. That was a long and convoluted sentence.

Things are conceivably looking up on the raid front. The one real problem child on our team (the one I've mentioned before without going into too much detail) is apparently taking a break from the game for a while. Most of us had to breathe a bit of a sigh of relief as that allows us to put off the ugly process of having to remove them and possibly losing one of the tanks as a result. Anyway, last thursday went mostly well, except we struggled on Sindragosa again. Granted, we've only gotten her down the one time, but it would have been nice to breeze through the whole place up to Arthas in an evening. Ah well. We'll get it down to a science soon enough, and hopefully the Lich King will be close behind so we can start working on heroic hell. I did top the damage done/DPSe charts by a bit during the run too. Our feral druid was right behind me, and we both had a comfortable margin over the boomkin, lock and DK. I think our pally dpser would be leading us all if we didn't have him go heals during blood wing and Dreamwalker. I'm not mentioning this to point out how uber I am, but rather because I'm surprised by my standing on these charts. I believe most, if not all, of the team outgears me since they all do ICC25 and have gotten some stuff from there that supplements the 10man gear. Also, most of the stuff I've read out in the blogsphere indicates that I should be on the low end of the list as an elemental shaman. It's hard to say for sure as our team is made up of all hybrid DPS except for the lock. I don't really know how things would stack up against solid players from pure DPS classes. Either way, I wonder how far we would be as a team if all the dpsers could be within a percent or so of each other. Well, I've meandered through another post for long enough today.

later daze~Bero