The style of writing does vary from time to time and often may be viewed as self-indulgent prattling. There are many times I am horribly, horribly wrong or miss certain painfully obvious things. Some would say this adds to the charm. Likewise, grammatical and typographical errors likely abound. There is no excuse for this aside from sheer laziness.

Friday, December 17, 2010

For Want of a Hat

Spent a couple of hours running dailies for Wildhammer (yay!) and Tol Barad (boo!), interrupted by an amusing chunk of time where the Guild managed to put together nearly two full 5-man teams for dungeons before realizing that we had no tanks.

I have some time off next week so I intend to knock out a lot of the Christmas (err.. Winter Veil) events then, but I figured since I was out and about, I’d go ahead and get a couple of the easy achievements done. Cooking a few holiday recipes was quickly handled, as was rescuing a kidnapped reindeer. After some brief confusion and some internet searches, I obtained a pocket full of mistletoe and started the “Bros before Ho ho hos”. The Greench was overcamped, so that gets to wait until the server population is down. Since many of the achieves can’t happen before the presents are available on Christmas itself, I contented myself with getting some ‘holiday clothes’ and fruitcake.

The AH had pleasantly overpriced boots for sale and some kind soul had left a wintermas robe in the guild bank, so that was covered. All I needed was a hat. After camping the AH for a bit, I went to look up the requirements to see if it was something Zyrial could make and discovered to my horror it is a bind-on-pickup item. Oh noes! The hat itself is either obtainable as a random world drop or from certain bosses, the easiest of which may be the mage in Nexus. So, alone and tired to the Nexus I flew.

Wowhead noted that the hat doesn’t drop 100% from the ‘regular’ version, it had to be Heroic. Fine. We’d see how I do soloing a LK heroic. I stepped in and the mobs are level 81 elites. Fortunately, the spawns are for the most part not densely packed. I meandered up to the first dragonkin and reduced it to slag. This was promising. I repeated my success and in short order I was by the Hall of Suddenly Mobile Captain America Wannabes. The guide I had read noted they wouldn’t attack if you stayed out of melee range. A patrol consisting of a guy with two dogs and a larger aggro radius than expected approached. Not good. I made my decision and ran as the pack descended on me, weaving as I could to avoid the frozen foes with the intention of turning invisible to drop aggro once I was in the clear. What I had neglected to take into consideration was that the guide was written for the non-heroic version of the dungeon.

As I ran, ice exploded all around me and over a dozen and a half critters took me down fast. Terrific. I returned to the dungeon and opted to take a different path to my quarry and went over a couple of floating platforms taking groups of three on with judicious use of invisibility to sneak past a rather large clump of potential hurt and mirror image against patrols. In short order, I faced Mage What’s-her-Name. She was wearing a hat and—oh, LOOK! Under 225k health? Cake!

Burning my cool downs, I lit into her like a cat aflame and in less than seven seconds I had her at half…and things turned ugly. She “split” into 3 copies and lit up my world. I couldn’t make progress against the boss’ health until the three were burned down, but Time Warp was still active and it helped as I blasted my heart out. Once the three were down, I had a very brief respite to evocate some health and mana back. The boss again presented herself, but I was only given a few seconds to nuke her down to 50k or so before she split again. This time, tired and ragged from the fight I could only best two of the clones before tasting sweet, sweet floor.

I had only a few minutes before turning into a pumpkin, so I tried the dungeon again on ‘normal’ difficulty. Facing level 71 elites were substantially less threatening. This time Miss Thing bit pavement in five seconds flat, but despite her festive appearance, there was no hat to be had. Slightly saddened, I logged out. I’ll try again another time.

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