Oh god, what now.

I've tweaked the hell out of this blog over the past few hours. I hope it does not look like crap.

So hi, I'm Akiotena. I'm not exactly new to the world of blogging--I've had this account since 2001, but never really got into it as it was sadly lacking by way of ease of use. It has been quite a long time though, and it is much easier to navigate Blogger and its associated sites now, so... here I am.

This is probably going to be a bunch of me just rambling on about whatever comes to mind, mostly World of Warcraft, as that game absorbs a lot of my time). So! Here we go!

First, a brief introduction to my character, Duskflower:

Dusk is a level 70 druid, as you may be able to tell from the picture in my profile. She is a "Boomkin", a balance druid at 41/0/20 (I love me some Force of Nature). She often gets called on to heal and for that purpose she's got a ridiculous amount of healing gear. I would still like to play her more in doing DPS instead of heals, but I honestly don't mind healing. I find it rather fun.

My illustrious guild, Chaotic Onslaught, along with sister guild Syk, has begun to run Karazhan. It's been at least a month trying to get all the pertinent members keyed, but we finally did it. Tuesday was my first adventure and I managed to score an epic ring--the Spectral Band of Innervation. Which is hot. It's the first epic I've ever gotten. Hell, it's the first raid I've ever been in. I leveled Dusk to 60 about a week before the expansion came out. As such, I never got to really experience end game content before the expansion was released and blew all of that away.

On the subject of Karazhan, I've always adored the lore behind Warcraft. I've been playing the games since Warcraft II, and the storyline is wonderful. It feels extra special to finally be able to enter the mystical place that Medivh once lived in. Crazy ol' Medivh. I wonder if he'll show up again. I bet he does.

Anyway, the dungeon--we had four people that could heal (including myself), none actually specced for it. One of the paladins went and respecced to Holy right then and there and was more or less reliable, but it seemed like he was having a hard time with keeping up on heals. I backed him up, though I really had nothing to do until boss attempts, or if one of the two hunters had their traps resisted (it should be noted in this case that if they were hit more than once by the elite horses they *just died*, regardless of heals).

The first go through (and by this, I mean from the beginning to the first boss), I can't remember how many times we wiped or lost individual party members. There is a twenty-five minute timer essentially; that is, you have twenty-five minutes to kill all of the mobs and take down the first boss before you have mobs respawning. Why are the respawns important? Because if you initiate the fight with the first boss, all the mobs alive attack as well. Well, the first go, we did not make the timer, so when we attacked Midnight, we aggroed a bunch of other horses and ate shit.

The second go was better, however. We had kind of gotten used to the team dynamic at that point, and we cleared the mobs pretty easily (and well within the twenty-five minutes).

The actual fight with Midnight and Attumen the Huntsman was a tough heal. I was blown away by the amount of mana I went through in such a short time (I must have had about 9k). Of course, you know, HELLO RAIDING N00B, but still. Managed to keep the important party members up. I think. It was a turbulent time. Anyway, the ring I linked earlier and the Harbinger Bands dropped. The mage ended up taking the bands, and the shadow priest and I rolled for the ring. Needless to say, I was pretty jazzed when I won.

After the boss fight, the raid is saved to your character for the remainder of the week (until the reset!), so all those mobs were perma-dead. YAY.

We decided to head upstairs and attempt to take down Moroes and his cronies. At least, after everyone got portaled around and repaired (my gear had gone red by the time we *made it up* the stairs).

It was... well, quite unsuccessful. We found out that Moroes likes to kill healers first, and guess who was the top of the healing aggro list? Yeah. In both attempts, I died in less than a minute after the beginning of the fight. It was more or less an instant kill, too--somewhere around 7500 damage in one hit (2k armor and only about 7k HP does not a strong character make).

Needless to say, feeling pretty useless.

After that second attempt at Moroes, we called it quits, having at least had a small victory in killing one of his cronies. There is another planned attempt on Friday, and hopefully we will have a better mix of classes for it.

Personal Loot Round-up:

1x Spectral Band of Innervation
1x Design: Brilliant Dawnstone (sent to our resident Jewelcrafter)

Alright, I've spouted enough for now. It felt nice to get this all down though. I think I might just make this habittual. Or something.