Well, I’ve spent a good deal of time lately mostly ignoring my main.  Things had slowed down in my guild, and I wasn’t raiding regularly as I was missing out on the signups.  I spent some time working on my Hunter, who is now reasonably geared in mostly T4 level epics.  I tell ya one thing, he sure can blow through his dailies much faster than my T5 level Resto Druid.  Sometimes I wonder if I should level HIM when Wrath hits.  But, that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve also gotten my Shadow Priest up to 62, and also worked on his trade skills.  He has tailoring at around 365 and his enchanting is up to about 320.  Two very nice trades to have, and I’m glad I picked them up.

But, as you surely know, I was in Black Temple Saturday night.  It’s time to start working on my main again.

One of the reasons he had fallen by the wayside a bit is that he’s more and more difficult to improve.  It seems the further you go in terms of gear, the more difficult it is to reach that next level.  Well, now that I’m officially in T6 content, the time to refocus is here.

For starters, I’m looking at all the badge gear that’s available, to try and find the best bang for my buck.  The healing leather chest is a nice upgrade, but not game-changing.  There is a nice ring, along with a decent pair of gloves, but neither screams out to me.  I already have the awesome pants that are available.

For pure, huge upgrade, there is really only one choice:  The Gavel of Naaru Blessings. I’ve been carrying the Shard of the Virtuous for, like, ever. I just can’t seem to get lucky with any of the other drops, like off the Prince for instance. I also have not taken Lady V down, and she carried a nice healy mace. I think I finally realized that the Gavel is just the way to go.

It’s high time I start farming badges.  It’s going to take some time to get to 150, though, and I hope I can stick with the program.  I’m sitting at 56 as of now, and the last two days have made sure to do the heroic daily.

The good thing about that is that yesterday it happened to be Shattered Halls.  I’ve never finished SH.  I  have actually only TRIED once — it was long ago, it was a pug, and we didn’t get past the gauntlet.  So it was nice to see content I hadn’t seen before, and I also made sure to pick up the quests there as well.  I still needed the Honor Hold revered head enchant, and I’ve needed it for a long time.  I just haven’t had the heart to beg for heroic HH instance runs.  Heart be damned, I’m going to be begging.

Well-geared Resto Druid LFG — anything that gives badges!

They said it couldn’t be done.  Well, I guess “they” is a little nebulous.  The fact is I thought it couldn’t be done.  PTD in the Black Temple?  The Unholiest of Unholies?  Yeah right.  Well, as I said recently, I was signed up to do just that last night.  I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about a raid invite as the one I got last night for BT.

Our alliance recently decided to change focus from strictly T4 and T5 raiding to more a mix of T5 and T6.  We’ve done the first couple of bosses in MH, and this week we started on Black Temple.  They went Wednesday night (a night this Part Timer can’t make) and downed Najentus.  So last night was a continuation, and we would be starting with Supremus.  Let’s get started with the rundown.

The area around the Black Temple is one I generally avoid.  Too many random nasties about, and I don’t like random nasty deaths.  About the only time I’m in the area is to do the Armament daily from the Isle of QD.  So most of the area was unfamiliar to me.  Heck, I didn’t even know HOW you got in BT.  It turns out you go through a hole in the side of the temple.  Pretty cool.  Here is a shot of the first thing you see.

Yeah, pretty standard looking cave area.  But this is the Black Temple, baby!  I even DISCOVERED it!  Excluding QD, I haven’t discovered anything since SSC about 4 months ago.  I was a little geeked up already.

Anyhow, as this was a continuation, we just ran through a few areas that had been cleared.  Here is a pic of where they say the first boss was located.

On we went, and finally started clearing trash before the second boss, Supremus.  I’m sure you’ve all seen trash before, so I won’t bore you.  There are some dragon dudes, some worker dudes, some other dudes.  We wiped once by pulling in the wrong place and getting oodles of adds.

After awhile, the trash was cleared, and I got to take some vanity pics while we set up for the fight.

First, PTD the Tree in BT, with dead mobs behind!

Next, a shot of the big bad himself, Supremus.

That’s one big, bad elemental dude. Scary. It turns out he hits for a LOT too!  We started at 8 PM server, and were scheduled to go to 12 AM, a four hour raid.  (A four hour raid. [Gilligan's Island Theme Plays])  Now, I won’t bore you with all the fight details, but I’ll try to sum up.

There are two phases for Supremus.  In phase one it’s a basic tank and spank.  Basically you need two tanks for the fight, one holding the aggro, and the other there to avoid this big, nasty hateful strike that does some 14k or so damage.  The healers’ job is to keep both tanks as close to topped as possible.  If either goes down, it gets ugly fast.

In phase two, Supremus basically randomly picks raid members to, well, pick on.  He targets one player and charges at them.  He charges pretty slow, so you can kite him around.  He does this for a few seconds before switching to another target.  What this means is during this phase everyone is pretty well spread out, and prepared to run if they are the target.  I found that for druids, Cheetah form is the bomb in this encounter.  Special thanks to Matticus for letting me know I could USE cheetah in this battle.  It made getting away from Supremus a piece of cake.  Also during the second phase, volcanoes pop up all over that do huge AOE damage.  If one pops by you, you better move, and fast.

That’s it.  The fight switches back and forth between those two phases at timed intervals.  One of the keys is the switch from phase two back to phase one.  At that point the tanks have to pick him back up FAST and the healers have to get back in position FAST and let loose the healing.  This is the real struggle of this fight, IMO.  Most of phase one and two are pretty easy when you know what to do, it’s the transition that can kill a raid.

Any how, 4 hours later, 10 attempts, and one re-clearing of trash later, Supremus was down.  Sadly, I was down too, but I took a pic anyway.  At fifteen minutes, Supremus enrages, and we killed him at 15 minutes and 1 second.  Wow!  At that point we were also down to one tank, one healer, and about 9 or 10 DPS.  It was CLOOOOOSE, but we got him!

And here is our celebratory pic, after myself and others were rezzed, of course!

And that about wraps it up! We are now 2/9 in BT, and it feels great. I’m so glad I was able to go, and I felt like an important cog in our success. The loot was a DPS neck and DPS leather chest. I actually considered the chest for off-spec, but didn’t take it. I’ll leave you with two other interesting pics I got. One is of the top of the stairs after Supremus, and a familiar looking statue. The pic after that is the room right behind him, which I did not go further into. It looks cool, though!

One other note before the pics.  You can raid casually. Your friendly neighborhood PTD is living proof.  You have to finagle to get it done, but you can.  I only raid ONE night a week, and I’ve now seen almost all of SSC and some of the Black Temple now too.  Don’t think that just because you’re a casual player you can’t raid.  Anyhow, enjoy the next two pics, and thanks for reading! You stay classy, World of Warcraft!

No, I haven’t seen Dark Knight yet, though I’m itching to.  Ledger just looks great as the Joker, much more frightening than the Jack Nicholson version from 1989.

Anyhow…

I don’t know about your server, but over on Whisperwind we seem to be having a bit of a tank crisis.  Take a gander at the LFG channel, and chances are you’ll see multiple groups just looking for one last piece to start a run - a tank.

Let’s face it, good tanks are hard to come by.  It’s a tough enough job running with people you know, it much be semi-nightmaric to try to tank a PUG run.  I don’t even want to get into what a Warrior’s repair bill looks like after a heroic PUG.  Ugh.

Also, in my guild one of our main tanks took a vacation for about 2 weeks and we were short a very important piece.  (Zhen, you’ve got some nerve!)  One of our other main tanks has been suffering from on again off again burnout, which doesn’t help.  Because of all that it’s been difficult to get even guild runs off the ground.

Well, I’ve been considering the unthinkable.  Respecing.  If you’ve read my blog for awhile, you’ll know that I leveled feral all the way, and spent a good 3-4 months when I hit 70 as a feral druid.  Well, I was a little afraid of trying to lead runs at the time, so I was always vying for DPS spots in instances.  That proved to be quite difficult, and my guild was also running a little low on healers.  So it was that Pummra was reborn as a resto druid.

I took to healing like a fish to water (more on that later) and haven’t looked back.  I enjoy my role as a healer, and I’ve come a long way in terms of gear and skill.  In my good healer gear, I’m sitting at about 1900 +heal - not a huge number, but more than adequate for T5 and everything below that.  Since I’ve raided SSC, Kara and Heroics so much, I’ve also slowly been amassing tanking and DPS gear.

I didn’t know how far I had come in that respect until the other night.  I knew I was close to a really good tanking set, but I didn’t know how close.  When I put everything on, I was at 10.2k health, 18k+ armor and 418 defense.  And that’s resto spec’d.  I had kicked around the idea of trying to tank again before, but I just got a couple more recent upgrades to push me over that magical 415 defense number.  I have some fantastic pieces, like the Wildfury Greatstaff from SSC.

So should I take the plunge? I very well might, and even offered to OT Kara Friday night if necessary. I don’t like the idea of paying for respecs all the time, as I still plan to raid as a healer, but I’ll live with it. I’m no longer intimidated by leading or marking on runs, so expect to see Pummra’s Big Bear Butt soon!

I had never run heroic Magisters’ Terrace before last night.  I had heard how tough it was, and based on how tough MagT is in regular mode, I believed the hype.  Well, last night I got to see the truth.

The group was a Druid tank, a Lock, Mage, Hunter and myself, the Tree.  Perhaps a warrior or pally tank would have been preferable, but I’d say that’s pretty close to an idea makeup for that instance.

We started out just peachy keen, one shotting the first two bosses without any wipes.  Things got a little dicey when we got to Delrissa, but we took her down after a couple of attempts.  She was also gracious enough to drop the [Vial of the Sunwell], one of the only drops I was looking for in there.  I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about that trinket, if it had +heal it would be a slam dunk, but I’ll test it out and see how it flies.

That pull between Delrissa and Kael, though, is just plain nasty.  Groups I am in RARELY wipe on five man trash, but that is one case where we did.  Even with the great blend of CC we had going, it’s just a brutal pull.  Still, we took them down in a couple of tries.

Then, the big guy.  Those fireballs he flings around hit HARD!  I made a big mistake in our first few attempts, I was trying to stay out of tree form since I had to worry about the phoenix.  Never again.  It was all I could do to keep the tank up, and if any of the squishies got aggro, forget about it.  2 fireballs and they were down.  We probably wiped on him 5 times before I finally found the error of my ways.  I finally wisened up enough to just stay in tree form and deal with the Phoenix slow feet and all.  That made all the difference, and we took his butt down.  It was a great learning experience for me, as I found that sometimes you just have to stay in Tree no matter what.  The bonus from the aura and the mana efficiency made all the difference in the world.

Oh, and I also ended up picking up the [Phoenix Hatchling].  Woot!

All in all, it was a fun night.  In  the future I don’t anticipate Heroic MagT being a real problem as long as we have a good CC mix.  I also got 2 drops I was looking for, along with 4 badges, and all it cost me was 24g in repairs!  :)  All in all, I’d call it a nice, challenging instance where you can easily get your head kicked in.  I have the bruises to prove it.