Master's Key

I now hold in my hand, a shiny, brandspanking new, hot off the presses, copy of the Master's Key which will give me access to Karazhan.

I'm not sure how long it'll be before I set foot in there, but the key is mine.

I definitely enjoyed the attunment process. Other than one glitch which was my own fault, the process was a big enough challenge without being tedious or overwhelming. Plus, the #2 guy in my guild is an awesome helper who already has the key, but has been taking the new 70's through the necessary dungeons. Although nobody's seen him since thursday, so I ran Old Hillsbrad and Black Morass with some non-guild friends.

I mention a glitch in the attunment process. That was when I fought to help Thrall fulfill his destiny, but after I killed the boss dragon (last surviving party member, and after firing the killing blow, a DoT killed me) aparently you're supposed to stay as a corpse and watch a little animation sequence. If you release your spirit before the sequence completes, you don't get credit for the quest. First time through, guess what I did? Yep. So second time through, same exact thing happened, only 2 differences. First was that there was another party member alive with me when the dragon died, and we both died from DoT after the kill. Second difference was that I didn't release, so I got credit.

Old Hillsbrad is just plain fun. And my second run through it, my group was awesome. When we started out, the other hunter went AFK and so 4 of us figured we'd try to get as far as we could without him. Well, 4-man'd it up until the Thrall escort started when we got a 5th to join. Just incredible synergy on the 4-man, bear tank who tanked like I've never seen done before. She was just outstanding, held aggro on everything in sight, except for my turkey who stayed nice and frozen. Healer on top of his game, and a Rogue who delivered huge damage, blowing me off the damage meter.

Then Thrall. I just love this escort. He moves fast, and you've got to be ready. The party leader had been through this a bunch of times on different alts, so he marked the targets really well and we were typically burning down the most important mobs fast.

We went pretty much straight to Black Morass afterwards.

It was my first time in there. Just amazing fight. Definitely the most drawn out fight I've been part of. Good to have a vet with us, because he knew exactly when to instruct each of us to use our beacon companion dragon pet thingie. I was on boss DPS duty, with the other hunter handling the adds. Hardest part for me was knowing when it was OK for me to drink to regain mana. I don't have any potions, so my only resort is to get out of combat and drink. I only did that between the bosses sometimes. The times when I did, it made a HUGE difference with how fast we'd down the mini-boss.

Great teamwork, and outstanding party leader. One wipe (luckily pretty early in the process, so not too bad to repeat), and then main boss goes down, and we get our quests done.

Off to Shattrath for a quick chat with Khadgar, and the key is mine.

Now for the hard part of gearing up and developing my play skills to actually be a solid contributor in kara. I guess its off to BRK and Kestrel and others for some minimum gear requirements and the path(s) to obtaining them.