And hello heroics

Though it's technically my second successful heroic, it's the first I've done after completing my mad max gear up and my first since March 17th(!). Had never run Shadowfang before. Was relatively enjoyable. We had one wipe before Lord Godfrey, and then had three. The fourth, we had two go down again, including the priest (who went down first maybe two or three of the four shots; still not sure how that happened), and I hit rebirth to bring her back.


Seconds pass, and no rez. Quick typing (the "@" symbol in my frantic "take the rez!@" is, of course, the Angband guy pleading too) and some mad off-healing later, she's taken my Rebirth and is back, I'm DPSing again, and we finally bring him down (though the priest dies again after we're done. I guess she kept catching the Cursed Bullets, but I wasn't calm enough to see.)

It was one of those exciting gaming moments when you breathe a literal sigh of relief. It's fun and, more importantly, memorable to scoot through by the seat of your pants. I was awfully lucky to have a group patient enough to sit through four wipes and a dungeon guide nice enough to give us the 411 on each boss. And I was even luckier to bag the Chaos Orb when it was done. Strangely, two in the party dropped as soon as Godfrey's loot popped up, not even interested in greeding a few more gold into their pockets.


Overall a good, fun run. I (barely) had burst DPS over 11k when things cut just right, and managed to keep it around 7.5-8.5k outside of trash (ie, bosses) when I wasn't off healing (strangely kept it around 6k+ even when I was). I'm not going to say all those hours of grinding gear paid off, as it's wasted time I could have been spending doing something productive (read: "paid"), but they have made the game more fun.

Wow, as an aside, I just Armoried (this is like Googling a date, isn't it?) the other folks. Gear scores:

Priest 345 (7 unenchanted items)
Shaman 342 (10 unenchanted, 9 empty sockets(!!), no belt buckle, unenchanted ring)
Tank/Prot Paladin 339 (5 unenchanted, 5 missing glyphs, no belt buckle)
DK (Frost) 352 (only thing missing is a Chimera's Eye)

And I thought I was behind. But I'm at 344 equipped and a perfect audit. Makes me wonder how much heroics have changed. The DK was the only guy doing serious damage consistently, but I guess I know why now.

Of course, as I've said before, off-healing is about as fun as it gets, as you really do feel you're the only thing between the group and failure. At least one boss required some off-heals and a tranq pop, and of course I had to heal our way through each of the wipes once the priest died (the first time, some DPS died first and I battle rezzed him, not knowing it was going to get lots worse, which kept me healing for a while). Honestly, that's a ton of fun.

I think the secret to good DPS really is mushroom use. I don't enjoy it, but it's growing on me, har har. I'm also using Pickled Guppy and Scrolls of Intellect, something I haven't done with regularity before.

Phew, I'm going to need to run a little archeology just to calm back down.

In other news, I got a free fishing pole with +25 fishing just for catching up with Nat, and even though some NPCs ignore Deathwing's fire, checking how badly the flames are killing your framerate is not A Good Idea.