Can of Corn

There is one lesson I should have learned years ago.  Never pick on someone for something, because sooner or later you are doomed to do the exact same thing.  A few weeks back I was picking on Ariedan from Wordy Warrior a bit for her lack of updates.  Then over the course of the last week I’ve had a pretty significant lapse in my postings.  I guess for lack of a better term, life happened.

Last week and this past weekend almost all of my time was devoted to minor home improvement projects, and cleaning.  Why on earth would I wear myself out doing this?  Well, we had a house guest coming this week, and among other things our house needed a good deal of TLC to get to a state fit for company.  As a result I am very much feeling my age.  Getting up and out of bed sounds like a bowl of rice crispies as my back straightens, followed by a chorus of groans.  However the house looks better than it has in years, and I am praying I will be able to maintain it.  My general state of “worn the hell out”, combined with limited time has thrown a severe case of “lack of giving a shit” when it comes to the frequency of my blogging.  So apologies for the lapse. 

One more oddball thing while I am on my traditional “real life” section of the blog post.  My local newspaper just launched this HORRIBLE google maps mash-up application where they attempt to show all the businesses in the Tulsa area as tiny indistinguishable dots on a map.  They made the mistake of showing the top searches on the right hand side of the page.  When my co-worker first hit the website, the first few phases were expectable… but number 5 in the list was “Can of Corn”.  So it has been our goal to try and keep this gem at number one.  So if you are bored, please hit this site and bump “Can of Corn” a few times for us.

Emo Aborted

Tuesday afternoon I was primed to make a rather self-indulgent and emo post about the rigors of raid leadership and the insanity it takes to try and lead at all.  Tuesday in 25 man Ulduar had a very “herding cats” feel to it, making me address all the things I dislike about the 25 man raid dynamic.  It hadn’t quite gotten to the point of my cyclical internal battle of “why don’t you just quit 25 mans and do nothing but 10s”, but we were probably teetering dangerously on the edge of that slope.  So you can probably only imagine the load of crap that would have been contained within the body of that post.  However I got tired, and busy and the post never made its way onto the digital page. 

Wednesday and Thursday happened, and both days restored my faith in humanity and the reason why I began leading in the first place.  First I have to start with my beloved 10 man group.  Even if the rest of the week had been complete and total crap, just getting through another Wednesday with my 10 man team is usually enough to push me through even the worst of Thursdays.  I’ve bragged on my folks so many times over the last few weeks it is probably getting annoying, but alas I have to do it again.

Wednesday night went by the books in every way.  We did our normal Leviathan > XT-002 Deconstructor > Kologarn > Auriaya clear to get to the bosses we would be working on this week.  While there we went ahead and pushed through and downed Hodir, making great time doing it.  From there we went to Freya and downed her in a single shot.

It was at this point that I made the judgment call, since we only had an hour of time left, I didn’t feel we really had enough time to adequately work on Thorim, so instead we began to backtrack.  We picked up Assembly of Iron, then moved to Razorscale, and still had time left for an Ignis the Furnace Master oneshot.  So for the second week in a row, in our 3 hour window we had cleared all of the bosses previously downed.  I am pretty damned proud of us downing 9 ulduar bosses in a single night.  This gave us plenty of time to come back in last night, and work out the kinks on Thorim.

Last night we managed to work through the issues we were having with Thorim very quickly in spite of some backseat driving going on in ventrilo.  I believe it was within 4 tries that we had to the second phase and managed to down him that attempt.  Among other things I got a shiny pair of ram shoulders (Valorous Siegebreaker Pauldrons), and we had plenty of time to start work on Mimiron.  In the few attempts before we called it, we managed to get him halfway into phase 3, so I fully feel that next week we will down him since we will be prioritizing his encounter.  Last week I posted about how wonderfully our team has meshed together, and I have to say things keep getting better as we learn to work as a cohesive force.

Hall of Winter Defrosted

Thursday we continued on in Ulduar 25 man.  Riding high on the weds night fun I was looking forward to the 25 man raid once more.  On Tuesday we had only managed to make it through Leviathan > XT-002 Deconstructor > Kologarn > Auriaya > Assembly of Iron, which on the day seemed like a letdown, but looking back now seems pretty good.  So as a warm-up we started the night with Razorscale, which went down the smoothest we have seen yet…  we have to find a way to get folks paying attention faster so we can finally knock Heroic: A Quick Shave out.

After this interlude we moved forward to the real focus of the night, Hodir.  It took us a total of 6 tries from start to finish to down him, but when we did it felt pretty stable.  In fact we managed to pick up Heroic: I Have the Coolest Friends in the process, and I personally picked up Heroic: Staying Buffed All Winter at some point throughout the attempts.  After Hodir, we moved on and cleaned up Ignis the Furnace Master which had always given us trouble in the past.

All in all it was a great week of raiding for Duranub and House Stalwart.