[singlepic id=45 w=250 float=right]For the last 24 hours, I have been torn. My soul has split in two. Should I see what people write about the fights, or should I wait for the full experience? Living in Europe, I obviously had to wait another day before I could upgrade to 3.3, and I was very anxious to see the changes to moonkins and, ofcourse, the new raid instance.

I’ll be honest: My pleasures in this game are limited. I’m not particular interested in (or good at) PVP, and I only do achievements if there is an actual reward for them; Drakes, if they have added flight speed or at least looks cool, special titles or if I can help a guildie with minimal effort. I haven’t bothered to do the heroic achievements because, frankly, there is no point to it, and I try to scurry out of any “Fun achievement runs for Ulduar 10!” groups that starts from time to time. It’s just not my thing.

I do like raiding, and I enjoy the lore a lot. So a new content patch is a really big thing for me, because I will suck up the stories, immerse myself in the new areas and get the full experience out of that. So with a whole new raid coming out, aswell as three new dungeons and changes to my class, I was really anxious to get going.

We had a rough start at the beginning of the raid. Lots of people having problems logging on, DBM being updated litteraly 3 seconds before raid start and such, so we were a little bit late on actually starting the raid – patch day, right? The people online and in the raid was busy ooh-ing and aah-ing at the new raid anyways, so it wasn’t a huge deal, and I was content simply looking at the druid tier 10 items in the dressing room. I squeeled with glee a little bit as I noticed that the shoulders look like they are breathing.

We started the raid, and began on the trash, which mostly got AOE’d down. We did have a few pulls where we used crowd control, with the nasty casters and the giant whatstheirname coming around to disturb our fighting, but most of the trash leading to Lord Marrowgar was fun, although unoriginal.

Marrowgar was a fun fight, where I positioned myself well back from him – so far back, in fact, that nobody saw my boner (tee-hee-hee) and I was dead for half the fight. We got him down in our first attempt, though. Lady Deathwhisper was a bit easy for me, as I simply stayed on her for the whole fight, but we did wipe on our first pull, simply to get a grasp of the fight – she went down on second attempt.

The Gunship battle was quite entertaining. Spending my time in the cannons was enjoyable, and the short breaks to DPS down the mage when they froze our cannons was fun. The whole guild cracked when we noted just how the Jetpack looked on a bear druid, and if you haven’t seen it before, you just go ahead and take a closer look at the picture above.

We accedently pulled Saurfang, and it was a bloody mess (litterally!), yet still managed to get him down to 35% before his stacks became too much to handle. Second attempt was a kill, although we need to research it a bit more if we want a clean fight and a chance at heroics, because the blood beasts were all over the place. I was even specced for typhoon and glyphed with Glyph of Hurricane, because we only have one active hunter at the moment. I was the dog used to slow the adds, but they took very little damage from AOE spells. Regardless, he died on the second pull, so all was well.

A lot of very nice caster loot dropped, of which I got excactly 0 pieces of. I drolled a little bit when I saw the ring Ring of Rapid Ascent that drops from that fight, but unfortunately I didn’t manipulate the loot council well enough.

Overall, I am very pleased with the instance. We did go through it a little bit easy, but I suppose its geared for medicore guilds and not people who has been running through most of TOTGC25 man. I wouldn’t mind if we had wiped a bit more, of if the encounters were a little bit more difficult, but I can live with this for now – and I’m sure heroic version will be a challenge!

I was very concerned about our damage, and the bosses in Icecrown isn’t really the best fights to compare damage on, but I did notice that I had a higher DPS on Lady Deathwhisper than I had on any other fight, and although I realise that I only moved twice from Death and Decay, and never had to switch target, I did dominate the meters against the other people constantly on the Lady. Going back to my old rotation was a little bit difficult, because I didn’t get a chance to practice on dummies, and I realise how much I actually relied on Squawk and Awe. I patched it up with the Eclipse module for ClassTimer and a big Eclipse icon from Power Aura’s, and it wasn’t a huge deal for me to proc solar eclipse.

I did record videos of our fights (although I think I deleted the Marrowgar fight, or simply forgot to record it), but the fights aren’t that spectacular, so I wont spend time editing them into a kill movie – I might at some point. After the raid, I took a peak into The Forge of Souls with three guildies and two randoms from the new (awesome) LFG tool, but I didn’t clear the rest of the instances. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the changes, and I look forward to see how we will scale in the future.

- QQ