Friendly with the Violet Eye

Long story short....Amava 1, Moroes 0

Ok. Perhaps he wiped us once. And perhaps Amava died the next time with Moroes at 2%

Amava 0, Morose 2

But I've got two Badges of Justice that say the first score is right.

Now to turn a short story long, as I'm apt to do, here's the juicy parts.

Within seconds of logging in Tuesday night, I get a tell from a guildie/friend saying that another guildie needs a Black Morass run. Sure, I'm a big fan of that fight, so count me in. 4 guildies, we spend a while in LFM trying to find a healer. Worked out nicely because I got 5 daily quests done during that time. Ka-ching.

We find a Holy Paladin who also needs the run for his key

We handle BM like pros, and pewpewpew, and welcome two new players to the world of Attuned for Karazhan.

Within seconds of the BM boss dragon going down, Holy Paladin says his guild wants him in Kara that very moment, so he's got to hearth to Shatt to talk to Khadgar.

The remaining 4 of us decide to clear out some group quests, so we head up to Netherstorm and begin to putz around. I had already solo'd half the group quests we were trying to do, but it was fun working with some guildies and being pretty relaxed, and collecting some Netherbloom.

A little while later, I get a whisper from a friend who I run as much dungeons with as I can.

"hey amava? wanna come to kara?"

Hmmm? (lifts pinky to mouth, a la Dr. Evil)

I ask the guildies I'm with, including the guild's (informal) #2 if they mind if I go. I felt kinda bad, but in case you're not up on current events, I'm a bit itchy to get in there. They're all cool about it, and say it'll be a good learning experience for when the guild starts going in.

Summon to Deadwind Pass. I look at the raid group. Holy Paladin from BM is in there. My friend is dressed as a tree, when she's usually a bear, and she's lol'ing about it. I actually had over half the group on my friends list from PUG runs. Cool stuff. Small world.

They'd already cleared Attumen, and were on the trash going up the stairs towards Moroes.

Ok, self. Think. Turn pet on passive. Turn growl off. Check. Check.

Eat some burgers and some bits, drink some green juice. Drink some other green juice. Feed pet a couple times, just to be sure. Make sure Outfitter actually worked and swapped the Hourglass in for the Carrot. Make sure your fishing pole isn't accidentally equipped and your santa hat is in the bag and not on your head.

Turn on CLSaver. Activate BigWigs.

Between trash pulls, minimize WoW and download, install, and configure Ventrilo.

During pulls, remain overly cautious lest you target a mob off in the distance and send your pet off on a wild undead chase.

Get to Morose's room. First 2-pull, they specify 1 for me to trap. We've got a Mage handy, but OK, I'm game. Set trap, pull, mob comes my way, Wham Wham, I'm dead. ???? Must have resisted or somethin'.

Get rez'd then get stern talking to about keeping distance between me and my traps so I don't get 2 shot. Yeah, yeah. I know, the noob hunter just got killed by his turkey. I keep my mouth shut, I'm the new guy, and I can't argue the fact that I did indeed get killed by the blue square.

Next up is another 2-pull. Again, one marked for me to trap. Making sure that I leave more space than normal between me and my trap, we pull. Guy runs through my trap and IMMUNE flashes across the screen.

Boo-ya!!! I calmly call out that the guy is immune, and I concussive kite him until the OT comes to the rescue. Raid Leader does an excellent job of backpeddling and apologizing for (A) assigning immune target and (B) talking sternly to the new guy. Ok, apology accepted, tyvm. He really was pretty cool about the whole thing. Lets get on with the whoop ass.

Now we've got Moroes, 3 guys that everyone is calling Paladins, and 1 guy that people are calling a priest. They mark the priest for me with square, they mark one pally with moon for the other hunter. Then pally skull will be untanked and, they called it "DPS Kite", meaning that all DPS wrestle with the mob with whoever gets aggro moving away from the mob. Third and final pally gets X for Off Tank. Moroes will get main tanked.

I point out that the square is not suitable for a turkey because she'll just stand there and fry me or heal her buddies, which ever is her preference. Probably the first followed by the second. They're cool about it and switch the targets so 2 pallies are being tanked.

No talk of Polymorph which I felt was strange, but who knows, maybe they're immune or some other reason to avoid sheeping.

Pull goes, I do a moderate job of trapping the moon. I struggled to re-gain target on him after the healers out-threated me by the 4th trap. Once I got him back under control, the raid wiped.

Rez and try again. All is well in the world, and Moroes takes a dive, dying right next to the suckling pig on his dinner table.

I'm not sure what hit me, but I died with the boss at about 2% health. But the party continued on to victory. Rogue dagger and Mage cloth drops. I get my 2 badges.

We grind the way over to Maiden of Virtue. Tried 5 times. Nada. Combination of not enough stamina in the group along with too slow removal of the Holy Fires. Basically when you got the Holy Fire, you died. Made for pretty quick fights. We said good night and parted ways.

Reflections:

1) Pretty cool place, at least the parts I saw. I like the ball room atmosphere of Moroes, and the eerie harpsichord music went well with it.

2) Fights with 10 people are neat. I love the added complexity. When my guild gets in there, we're definitely going to need to step up the coordination a lot.

3) Some of the trash fights were really not any more complex, the mobs just have a ton of health and hit like trucks. Blah, that's not a whole lot different than a run of the (taren) mill 5-man, just a bit harder.

4) I need to play with my UI. Definitely need something that lets me see all 10 party unit frames instead of the 5 I was looking at. I've got a giant monitor, might as well cram it chock full of info that'll overwhelm me and largely go unnoticed due to overload :-)

5) Boss events are more involved than in the 5-man dungeons.

6) Nobody brings consumables. I was the only one with a food buff on my toon. I was nice and gave out some Ravager Dogs and some Blackened Basilisk that I had laying around, but other than that, nobody had any. I hope that's because they're new to Kara also and are still learning.

7) What's the deal with Raid ID? So am I allowed to go into Kara at all this week with other people? I definitely don't want to create a "raid ninja" situation where I go in with some other people and accidentally steal this guild's saved raid. I guarantee that since I went in on tuesday, the guild meeting on wednesday is going to be announcing a thursday raid. I just gurarantee it.

8) Can you use Polymorph on the mobs in Moroes' room?

9) WWS shows I missed 2 auto-shots (0.4%). Not a big surprise because I'm not quite at 142 hit rating yet. I'm not sure I'm concerned though, because to increase that hit rating, I'd need to replace some +agi or +ap gems with some more +hit gems. Doing so would effectively gimp the hundreds and hundreds of hits I had, in the effort of adding in two extra Auto Shots to my DPS output. Not sure exactly where the cutoff is, but it feels like there's diminishing returns on improving +hit any further. More tests to follow.