Light & Leafy

Me: I can haz tank 4 new instances? /cuddle
Bf: Sure, when do you want to run them?
Me: Nao! I luv lore!
Bf.: Ok, let’s grab some dps from the guild and head into heroics.
Me: Okies. I gotz phat lewtz. I can heal anything lolerskatez *smitesmitesmite*

Wednesday evening. The boyfriend and I decide to have a go at the 3 new instances, and because we’re obviously over-powered, we decide that we really don’t need to read up on them and we also don’t need to go into the normal versions.  Because, where’s the sense of adventure in that?  We grab a mage, a enhancement shaman, and a boomkin and away we go!

First things first! Forge of Souls! I get all the way out there, summon everyone and realize….I have one devout candle left. So I schlep back to Dalaran to buy reagents. In the mean time, everyone else has turned in the first quest and is ready to go. I fly back, salivate over all the juicy lore I’m reading, and finally finish so that Mr. Tank can go and pull the first group of mobs. Hey, those kinda resemble the nasties out in the various battle fields! We make it out into the open forge, and I’m breathless. It reminded me of the first time I saw Utgarde Keep; everything is so beautifully illustrated, and look at that down below! It’s a giant….

WHAT THE HELL?! Why is everyone’s health at or below 50%?! Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit. Heal the tank. Heal the mage. Crap, the shaman’s almost dead. What in the name of the Light is going on here? Dammit, E., mark the stupid targets so that everyone isn’t dpsing something different and tanking their own mobs! You.Will.Not.Die. *Casts Divine Hymn*

We almost wiped in the 2nd pull of the instance. All because I was admiring the architecture of the guy I’m going to be comissioned to kill. We kept plugging right on through, each pull requiring me to, you know, actually heal. I don’t remember the last time (before I went into the Frozen halls) when I wasn’t bouncing around casting holy nova or dealing with guild workings as I instanced. By the time we got to the first boss, I had enough sense to start proactively casting renew, and using wow-lotta flash heals to keep my serendipity stacks up so I’d have a quick greater heal or prayer of healing when I really needed it. Trying to heal efficiently and effectively in a heroic?! I call poppycock.

After what felt like a lot of trash (damn you, ToC for making me think no trash was the new norm), we made it up to the  first boss. Since none of us really knew what the hell was going to happen, we all charged straight into the middle of the room. Didn’t really get everything that was going on, but we did figure out pretty quickly that those little elemental-looking soul fragments were bad news bears. “Kill the pink thingy while I try to kite him” became a common refrain. Then all of a sudden this purple swirly thing started flying around the outside of the room, and a DBM warning yelled at us to converge on the boss. Which, since it was a raid warning, seemed like the smart thing to do. At around 3% of his health, he feared me into the purple swirly stuff and I realized why my DBM yelled at me in the first place. I was feared to the edge of his room and before I was even able to reclaim control of my priest, I was in angel form, looking over my party members and screaming, “WTF” at my monitor.

A quick rez and rebuffing later, we were heading down the ramp towards the final corridor. “Hey, I don’t think we need to pull that wraith in the corner, so I’m just going to L.o.S. the one inside the hallway….”

Now, normally I think my boyfriend is one HELL of a tank. That particular time made me want to roll up a news paper and bop him on the nose: BAD TANK! BAD! Don’t you EVER make me have to heal through two of those wraiths again…

The Devourer of Souls actually wasn’t so so bad; we lost the shaman when he was the first recipient of Mirrored Souls and our Boomkin and Mage destroyed him, but really we were able to get through it relatively unscathed. Silly shaman…

Of course, now Ms. Jaina wants us to get our hands dirty in the Pit of Saron. Again, I was astonished about just how awesome everything looked. Between the Frost Wyrm mount, and just legions of slaves everywhere, it did feel pretty epic. Oh, and having my boyfriend rescue a female dwarf only for her to ask him to have her babies was gosh darn priceless (what kind of babies do you get when you mix an undead draenei and a dwarf….)

Not knowing our way around, we killed a LOT more trash than we need to. Like, the entire left side of the instance, where there are no bosses. Everything seemed to go swimingly, probably because both the tank and healer were prepared for things to, well, hurt. We got to Garfrost, and all of sudden, there appears to be a saronite node flying in the air! In my direction. What the…

OWOWOWOWOWOWOWWW.  Note to self: when a boss hurls METAL at you, its generally in your best interest to get the hell away. After he chucked a few large chunks of saronite at random team members, DBM was screaming for us to “Hide Behind the Rock.” Wha? What rock? The only thing in here is the saronite…oooohhh. That rock. I gotcha. The rest of the fight was pretty much running away from the airborn crafting material and then running behind it so he couldn’t destroy us with his AoE frost damage. And we won, and there were all the happy slave freed from their captors! Yay!

Now it’s time to make our way to Ick. Again, really didn’t take the easiest route to get to him, but meh. We made it! And, surprisingly, Ick and Krick weren’t very difficult to beat. Run away from the purple orbs, check. Don’t stand in the green goo, double check. Flail around when the nasty flesh beast is chasing you, yep I got it.

I’m a huge lore dork. I gobble the crap up. I literally will email myself the Know Your Lore columns from WoW Insider, or lore articles from WoWWiki to read while I’m at work. My boyfriend knows this. He teases me relentlessly about it. So, while Jaina is interrogating a gnome death knight giving essential plot points, where do you think I’ll be? Standing at the bottom of a gauntlet, rip-roaring and ready to go? Or sitting with my face thisclose to the screen, clapping my hands giddily and possibly squeaking in excitement?

I manage to tear my eyes away from the lore for a second, only to see that EVERYONE ELSE’S HEALTH BAR IS RED. Bloody, giant-warning-signal red. My darling, brilliant, oh-so loveable tank decided to charge up the gauntlet. Knowing full well that the president could be standing in our living room, and I would be telling him to shhhhhhush so I can hear what Jaina is saying. At this point, it’s really quite useless for me to charge up there myself, so I wait at the entrance to rez everyone. I will say though, I love the fight to Scourgelord Tyrannus. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else, but it feels so epic and keeps you on your toes the entire time; it gives the game a sense of urgency I had been hoping for desperately since we were having a Ren Faire in the Lich King’s back yard.

Scourgelord’s fight was really not challenging at all, though I kind of wish I knew about his mechanics before I went in. I would have switched to my discipline spec to absorb the damage, rather than heal people (and Tyrannus in the process).

Around this time I realized I should really make dinner. And, of course, dinner comes with down time and some catching up on our T.V. shows. Thing is, our couch is magical. And by magical I mean ridiculously comfortable. I really, truly tried to stay awake, but once he was asleep on the couch, I knew I was a goner. I think we woke up around midnight to brush our teeth and stumble into our bed.

Thursday night, we decide that we REALLY want to go back and finish the questline on Osyras (his DK) and Edainne. We grab a few friends, thinking it won’t take but a minute. People have already done the fight (though, maybe not on this particular character), so we know that there will be 2 bosses with 5 waves of fast spawning trash before each of them.  AND everyone has to sit through the lore so impatient tank can’t be impatient! No problem, right?

I wanted to cry. For the first time, ever, I felt like I was a completely atrocious healer. I mean, I’ve made plenty of mistakes before, but this time I just couldn’t heal through anything. And if anyone died, we were kind of screwed since the trash spawns just quick enough to prevent any resurrection. We wiped so much I literally had to port back to Dalaran and repair (Also, wtf, Blizz? Why are there no repair posts close to the instances? Why are they all inside the freaking raid?!). I was frozen by archers, shadowstepped/slowed by freaking footmen, and devoured by mages. AND we were in one of the alcoves to the side. Seriously, the bosses were freaking jokes compared to the trash waves. I was using guardian spirit on CD and the shadow priest and I were blowing divine hymns and shackling anything that wasn’t getting hit by AoE. Eventually we made it through, but damn. I felt so utterly useless.

Trying not to spoil anything, I lurved the gauntlet as much as I lurve the cave in Pit of Saron. Being chased like that? AWESOME! Recognizing that at this moment we’re not strong enough yet to face the might of the scourge? Sa-weet!

Speaking of the gauntlet, wanna know something funny? You can get ahead of the walls. True fax. You’ll kill your party members in the process when they can’t tank the adds and everything ends up killing Jaina, but you can TOTALLY get ahead of the group, isn’t that right darling? *cough*

All in all, it was a helluva fun night. I ran the three instances again, and once I knew what I was doing and what the heck was going on, it wasn’t nearly as lawlfail as these attempts were.

Tl;dr: Eda’s a nub healer who’s lore-crazy, and the new instances are pretty and epic and feel like you actually are where you’re needed to be.