Ding 64 - Aspect of the Viper

Post #1 for the day. The normal routine...accomplishments.

Really only 1, but perhaps 1.5. You be the judge.

1) Ding 64
1.5) Downed Magtheridon

At 64, I got Aspect of the Viper. Sounds cool, better mana management. But now the quanry between Hawk and Viper. Any ideas about when to use one versus the other?

The note aboug magtheridon is really only a partial win. When I logged on, a guildie asked if I wanted to run Blood Furnace. Yeah, SURE!!! I join the group to discover 2 hunters (including me), 2 mages, and a warlock. I'm no expert on tanking, but I'm not sure I see any tank here, besides some pets and a minion. I could be wrong. I'm also no expert on healing, but other than mend pet and 2 stacks of heavy netherweave bandages, I don't see a whole lot of healing power.

I gently raise the issue ("so who's tanking?") and get answers like "dont worry about it". Gahhh. But OK, I figure we'll either wipe really fast and I wont have wasted too much time. And I might just learn about some hidden tanking powers in that group that I didnt know of.

Enter the instance, and its empty. They had cleared up until the room right before Magtheridon and one of their guys dropped. One mage logs off and logs back on with a priest. We clear the room right before mags. The priest logs back off and the mage comes back. I'm getting happier by the second. Not!

We down Magtheridon without much fuss.

So I'm really not considering that an accomplishment.

Oh man....I just had a total light bulb moment in my head. I was thinking that at least I did accomplish the collection of some orc blood vials for a quest. And bam-o, it hit me. I've got two quests in Blood Furnace completed, just waiting to be cashed in. Sweet, 20k XP just waiting for me to get home :-)

Back on topic...shortly after that group disbanded, the guild leader invited me to run Blood Furnace. Got a decent group together, all guild members which is nice, had a great run going, until we got locked out. Lemme explain.

We made it to the second boss, and cleared him, then somebody hit a lever that closed some gate that looks like teeth or claws or something, coming horizontally out of the doorway to the room. This closed behind us, and we didn't think anything of it at the time.

We continued on for a bit. Then the mage. We got a replacement, but he couldnt get to us because the teeth had closed behind us, so we could see eachother, and dance with eachother (I'm a dork and I /dance all the time, even though the Night Elf female Britney/Toxic Alizee (edit - thanks Pike for the correct dancer) dance is pretty stupid), but he can't get past.

The mage who DC'd was a major contributor to our DPS, but we decided to try to 4-man it anyways.

We made it to the room right before Mags (sound familiar?). There's two packs of 3 mobs. You can pull them separately. Both packs have two big melee guys and one caster. The plan was for me to freeze one of the big guys, and then focus all firepower on the caster. Lacking a big part of our DPS, it was going to take a while to burn these guys down, so I knew I was going to have to freeze this guy at least 3 times, if not 4 or even 5. And with me being distracted by this trapping stuff, I would not be as big a contributor to the takedowns as I would otherwise be. But with the mage gone, the damage meter was showing that I was basically it for the DPS, with the other DPS guy barely out DPS'ing the healer who would throw in some offense as the situation allowed. So that guy needs to be talked to, but at least he's a team player. I can live with the low DPS output for now.

But not last night. We just couldnt pull it off fast enough and wiped.

Everybody's got high spirits because we think we know what we did wrong, and actually might be able to do it.

We get back into the instance and find those teeth blocking our way. I tried searching all the dungeon guides I could to no avail. Nobody had any info about the silly Blood Furnace tooth gate. We ended up having to leave and reset the instance. But by then I had to go to bed. It was an awesome run for a group that was built entirely from guild members, which always makes me happy to see.