Of Bears and Legends

The more astute among you probably noticed I’ve posted a few things on the same day this blog launched. I was writing a few thoughts out trying to decide whether or not to launch Smelly Wet Bear when I finally took the plunge. Don’t worry – I probably won’t be posting quite so much when I clean out my computer a bit more.

Anyway,

Good Day, Eh, and welcome to post three.

I wrote Kara Conundrum a short while back and in that post I mentioned that I’d found a raid as a bear OT thanks to the efforts of a polar bear that is in what is probably the dominant raid guild on my server. He ran with his Shammy alt as main healer and picked up a few of his pals to fill out our ranks.

Our first run was Friday and it went fairly well for what amounted to a well geared semi-PuG. I say that a little tongue-in-cheek since slightly more than half of the raid knew each other – though some only a little. We managed to clear Attu, Moroes (though it took a bit longer than it should have) and Maiden. We even took down Curator on our first go – so that should give you an idea of where we were at gear-check wise. Then, feeling good, we ran up to Aran and he very quickly littered his floor with us. So we moved on to Chess and pounded the Horde into the floor for some easy loot.

All in all it was a fun run, if a bit long. I also mentioned in a previous post that my polar friend organized a guild dedicated to the pre-BC raid content as a means of training raiders. I felt a great sense of gratitude toward my bear buddy so when he said he was gonna run AQ40 as a follow up I decided to bust a hump on over there to lend a hand.

Now I should say that while I’ve owned WoW for about a year and a half, I didn’t have a level 58 to take to Outlands when BC hit (alt-itis). So I never saw Molten Core, or Naxx, or AQ20/40 or even ZG pre-BC. Heck, I never bothered with BRD, Strat or Scholo either since I hit 58 after the launch.

So this offer was sorta cool. I could go take a peek at some parts of things I used to hear about and see what all the hubbub was about and maybe learn a thing or two.

It was fun – we had a T5/6 warrior tanking for us and ran through a lot of it in about two hours (even took down a boss they said had only been downed once before, pre-BC), then moved on to MC for a complete run. I even grabbed a 66 pally buddy from my guild so he could see it as well – his brother is the raider in that family so he hadn’t seen MC either. That was also a lot of fun for a post-BCer like myself, but we ran really late so I bailed at 4 AM when they moved from MC to ZG for a mount run – man those cubs wore this old bear out!

I’m really looking forward to our next run but I’ve started noticing a potential issue – raiding on two characters is fun, but I’m getting a little wore out. I might need to cut back on the pre-BC content for a while to catch some needed Z’s. Thank goodness for the week off I’ll get over the holidays. I might even be able to farm up enough to pay for all this raiding.