reluctant transmog

So... Blizzard has this brilliant, brilliant strategy. Since they know they aren't offering us enough new content this expansion, they tried to offer us a huge time-sink comparable to raiding that would set both raiders and non-raiders a-tizzy with excitement.

This time-sink recycles old content and encourages nostalgia runs.
It potentially demands re-running ad nauseum old content and nostalgia runs.
It puts enough restrictions that players will have to spend more time deciding what they want, then more time going and getting what they decided on.

Oh, transmog, you genius you.

I wasn't going to participate. How dare I accept transmog instead of a whole tier of raiding? How dare Blizzard think they can promise me more bosses for Cataclysm and only deliver us 7 for T12, then nerf the hell out of that and put this new shiny not-raiding thing before me? Huh? Huh!

And yet... I've been looking around for stuff I might like to be for my transmog set. Pally tier gear doesn't do it for me (though if I could replicate my ICC set I would, but I wore cloth and mail then). So I've been shopping on the Auction House. I found a set of greens from BC I think I really like. No pictures yet, I need a belt.

It all started when we were doing Ulduar (because we only had 22 people show up for a raid, and we had to do something). Lots of purple drops. This mace dropped off of somebody. I thought, hey, that's kinda neat. The loot officer said, take it, what else are we gonna do with it.

Granted, I love having my spellpower axe, but I'm also aware that next tier I'll probably be stuck with a mace. Again.

Since then I've been camping the AH looking for neat gear. And we're not able to use this feature yet! How ridiculous is this?

proto drake goodness

Proto-drakes are my favorite mount. And I have to say, the Ironbound is elegant.

in before its too late

So I totally should have mentioned WEEKS AGO that I got my rusted protodrake! My new guild had a group going every week to Ulduar 10 that actually had room for us so we helped them get a few of the bosses that Mayhem and I already had (considering it was our first week in the guild, I was SOOO glad we already knew firefighter), and then spent a few weeks on Yogg.

I'm not usually the super-lucky type, but we got our 310 mounts three hours before the server went down for patch 4.0.1.

We of course, went on to do Algalon. Screens below. I was blown away by how pretty that fight was, since I'd never seen it. I'm enjoying the Starcaller title, it's still (kinda) rare on our server.

I am so frickin' fast now!

Firefighter

Firefighter was hard. And so fun. I cried tears of joy when we got him!

Achievement Spam (Uld 10HMs)

Last night we went into Ulduar to start doing hardmodes in 10 players.

I have not had that much fun in a raid in a while. We wiped several times on Levi but in a good group, I could care less if we were wiping. We were still making improvements every time. Honestly, at least one of those wipes was me, and I learned from the experience.

I am excited about the way that the RL set up the group. We go in for an hour (maybe two if everyone has time) on Monday nights, get a couple of bosses down, and go about our merry ways. This is perfect - most of us didn't want to add yet another four hour raid session to our raid schedules (four is plenty), but I still wanted a chance to get into Ulduar. I've never really been there on my paladin (my "declared main" was priest through most of Naxx and Ulduar, and that was back when we were sticking strictly to 10 man progression on a fairly casual level). We drastically outgear it, but there will be some challenges there. Ulduar trash can still kick our asses if we pretend we can't possibly fail. There are some fights I've only seen on 25 after my guild already had it on farm, so I never got to learn them the same way.

It was quite delightful to get Leviathin down and have all ten of us get four different achievements. That was quite some nice achievement spam!