I had originally planned on this great post contrasting my 5 favorite raid mechanics and my 5 most hated raid mechanics, but on the day after Eggs-mageddon I had to post a note about the holiday event. First off, let me open this with the blanket statement of… damn you Blizzard for giving me the carrot that is the Violet Proto Drake. As a result, I am obsessed with obtaining every holiday title so that come brew fest I can get the drake.
The key point here that you all need to know… is that I HATE the holiday events with deep burning passion. I enjoy the events like brew fest, hallows eve, and fire festival because they have “bosses”. Killing a boss over and over for epics is fun, doing a bazillion mind numbing meta-achievements however is not. Needless to say, I am not the player this content was designed for, however I feel obsessed to conquer it much like a raid boss… but in this case it isn’t for loot, its for the reward of never having to do it again.
Somehow I guess I had blotted out of my mind that yesterday would be lost completely to mindlessly playing a game of trying to get to the egg spawns before all the other players. I was still logged in Saturday night/Sunday morning when the content rolled in and players in guild started talking about it. I cringed knowing that my Sunday would be lost no matter how hard I tried to avoid doing so. I found a sweet spot in Kharanos at the start where I could reach two eggs. However anytime I was a second late clicking the egg as it would spawn, I would miss out and end up cursing wildly.
I am not a friendly player during these events. I turn into an obsessive and boorish asshole, and I decorated our guild chat with more expletives than I have said in months. Why you ask? Because my luck is horrible. I was one of those 7/8 people back during the Valentines event. I got 4 bags of candy, and managed to still wind up one candy short of the title. So going into Noblegarden I expected that I was going to need the 305 chocolate candy that is required to acquire all of the BoP items needed to get the title.
Sad thing is… this assumption was not far off. After 165 eggs carefully stole from unwitting players also vying for them I got my very first non chocolate drop, the White Tuxedo shirt. Another 15 eggs later I got a duplicate. I took a break after 205 eggs, and did the Chocoholic achievement, bought my Spring Robes and Spring Flowers and proceeded to try and get as many achievements done as I could, so I would at least feel like I had made some progress for wasting my entire day.
Honestly the Shake your Bunny-Maker achievement was far easier than I had thought it was going to be. Honestly being able to dual box and log in a horde alt to communicate with players was invaluable, but I imagine that /beg and /wait used together would have done the same thing. I set out to grab all the horde players first, and within a hour or so I had all of them knocked out. Then I grabbed the rarer alliance first, leaving dwarf female for last since we have several of those in guild that I would harangue into coming to Dalaran.
Finally this left me with nothing left standing in the way of my title other than the Spring Rabbit. So I grabbed a fresh drink and sat down resigned to knowing that I was going to have to farm up another 100 Chocolate Eggs in order to buy it and complete the title. I had already done 205 to this point, I could handle another 100, I could brute force my way through this. Finally my luck started to pay off, around egg 250 I got the Rabbit’s foot to drop. After some ping ponging around the map, I got my Noble Gardner achievement and I was done with this hell by around 3:00 pm server. So now I sit on the near side of the mount, 5/8 titles out of the way.
The stuff that didn’t suck…
The key point of the weekend was Saturday night I got asked to fill in as DPS in a friends semi-pug Ulduar raid. They use the shroud system for loot, which I was unfamiliar with, but I went in to experience some of the fights and not for loot. We are planning on taking Duranub into Ulduar for the first time this Tuesday, so to me any pre-game reconnaissance was invaluable since in a few short days I would be expected to lead the troops through the content.
We downed Flame Leviathan without much issue. It’s a very fun fight, or at least I enjoyed it far more than I expected to with a “vehicle fight” (damn you Malygos phase 3, damn you all to hell!). I played a chopper, which was ridiculously fun laying down patches of tar for the kiters. I think honestly what makes this fight fun, is movement is in the 2D plane, no more trying to gauge distance and height and all that crap. My friend Aigie who also went along on the run managed to pull out a winning bid on the epic priest gloves, so was I thought going to be our high point for the evening.
However we move on to Razorscale, and through much work we manage to down him. This was coincidentally this groups first time doing so, so everyone was very pumped. I click the corpse and see it… the object of my growing obsession. See when it comes to loot, I tend to obsess over whatever item is the hardest to find a replacement for. In BC it was The Unbreakable Will, in Naxxramas it was Slayer of the Lifeless, and there on the corpse was my current obession… Veranus’ Bane.
I am thinking to myself… there is no way in hell I am getting it, but I will bid all my points. Turns out, this group apparently has NO warrior tanks, and none of the dps were willing to risk any significant amount of points on an offspec ranged weapon. So now here I sit, not even really raiding Ulduar in earnest yet with the best tank gun in the game already acquired.
Congrats on the gun 🙂