Highmaul Attempts

Brilliant Ideas

Last night my wife and I thought we had a great idea.  I was in Highmaul raiding until 10pm my time, and we thought after that we would pop out to Wal-mart to pick up the ingredients for all of the recipes we were going to fix today.  Normally speaking we avoid Wal-mart like the plague, but there were a few things we needed in addition to the normal grocery store fare.  Any store at this time of the year is sheer madness, but we thought surely by 10 pm the crowds would have lessened.  It seems like everyone had this same idea because Wal-mart was completely insane.  The entire time in the store there was this persistent “crowd” noise of hundreds of people chattering.  This was only perforated to the sounds of a wailing child… that went on for a good five minutes without stop.

The biggest frustration was the general state of disrepair the store was in.  We attempted to gather up the ingredients we needed but kept running into obstacles.  When I went to get crushed pineapple for example there were two women there fighting over the last few cans.  After listening to one of the workers it sounded like they were stocking the shelves and stuff was flying off before they could finish stocking.  The biggest problem was that nothing really made any sense as to where it would be located.  The two women fighting over the crushed pineapple… apparently missed the warzone that was the palette of various fruit fillings out in the main isle.  I had scrounged up four small cans hoping it would be enough…  when I stared down and saw an entire case of the big cans just sitting there out in the main isle.

Peaceful Oasis

Normally speaking the checkouts are the worst part of a trip to Wal-mart, but after having to navigate that obstacle course that was the store…  this time the check out line actually seemed rather peaceful.  We had quite literally just made a break for it, only having gathered up about half of the things on our shopping list.  The strangest thing about last night was the fact that so many people seemed to just be wandering around aimlessly in the store, without a basket or a purpose.  There was this pack of one adult and four teenage boys that didn’t seem to have any real mission other than always moving slowly in whatever isle we needed to go down.  My wife had to stifle several curses, so it was most definitely time to exit the building regardless of the results.  Reasors our local grocery store chain was also open 24/7 so we figured whatever we were missing we could hopefully get there.

Whereas Wal-mart looked like a chaotic post apocalyptic wasteland..  Reasors was a pinnacle of calm and order.  Every shelf was well stocked, there were no random cases of food blocking the isles, and the workers all seemed to have the grace of angels.  We should have come here first and completely ignored Wal-mart because they had quite literally everything we needed in large supply and with no land grabs in the canned fruit isle.  I have a feeling that as we go through the day today, we will need to make a trip out to get this or that thing we forgot… and in that case I am most definitely going to Reasors.  The biggest frustration last night seemed to be the death of common courtesy.  In Wal-mart there were a number of times where we would wait on someone to pass, or let them turn out of an isle into the main lanes.  Never once did anyone even acknowledge the fact that we existed…  let alone say “thank you”.  Sure we were just as stressed as anyone there, but we took the time to thank the people who showed us where something was or let us pass with our carts.

Highmaul Attempts

Last night was the only raid night we will have this week, with the holiday and such.  With that in mind we were hoping to at the very least clear all of the content we have been able to kill so far, and we managed to accomplish that.  In a single night we did Heroic Kargath, and then started in on Normal moe clearing Kargath, Butcher, Brackenspore, Tectus, and Twin Ogron.  We managed to clear all of this with plenty of time to put in a half dozen or so attempts on Ko’ragh.  The only fight we failed to oneshot was Tectus which still seems like a completely chaotic mess.  We are trying really hard to organize said chaos, but it feels like there is something we are either missing or that has not quite clicked yet on how best to move the melee group and the ranged group.  There were still several points where the melee could not engage the bosses because there was too much death swirling around on the ground.  We however pushed through and had a really good attempt allowing us to move on.

Ko’ragh on the other hand still feels confusing as hell.  We are starting to grasp the concepts, but have yet to quite figure out the best way to deal with the adds.  Last night we tried leaving the melee on the boss until the adds were gathered up on the tanks, but this seemed to be too much incoming damage for a single tank to manage.  I have a feeling that next week we will return to the melee wrecking the adds one by one as they come in.  In any case we keep getting further each time we work on it, so I have a feeling given a normal two night raid cycle we would have likely beaten him.  My biggest concern is that I feel like Gladiator dps is lagging behind what it should be.  The problem is I really don’t like the feel of fury this expansion, and I have a feeling that Arms is just as untenable as Gladiator seems to be.  Thankfully I have been leveling and gearing my Deathknight so if I have to switch characters to be viable for raiding… that is option as I am enjoying frost dps still.  Gladiator adds a lot of functionality that is nice to have, just fearing that there will be a point where it simply is not enough to make up for the lower dps.1