Due to me traveling, in a different timezone and on a laggy laptop, I didn't group at all last week. So when I came back home on Saturday, I spent the rest of the weekend in guild groups, and had a lot of fun. My guild is on a "last chance to see" trip to Scholomance, Stratholme, and UBRS, trying to do a couple more raids to these places, before patch 1.10 makes that impossible. So over the weekend I did Scholomance twice, Stratholme once, and UBRS once, all of them in raid with my guild, playing Kyroc, my priest.
Loot in such dungeon excursions is extremely variable. On some trips nothing even remotely useful for your class drops, on other trips you end up getting more than average. On the first Scholomance trip the only thing I got was the recipe for the Felcloth Bag, which is a 24-slot soul shard pouch for warlocks, but that recipe is from a book which always drops from Janice Barov, and every tailor in the group can get it. Not really useful, as the materials for the bag cost over 20 gold, and I'm not sure any warlock will spend that much for a bag which just has room for 4 more soul shards. After the Scholo raid we continued doing Plagueland raid and group stuff, killed Araj the summoner for a guild mate, finished The Last Barov PvP raid quest for me and some others, did the Battle of Darrowshire for another guild mate, and finally killed Duskwing and Borelgore for me.
On the Stratholme raid I was exceptionally lucky. I got my Devout Bracers, thus I'll be able to start the first patch 1.10 tier 0.5 upgrade quest and see how good or bad they really are. Then we met a rare boss mob, Skul, and I got Skul's Ghastly Touch, a very nice shadow wand. Before I was using a green wand dealing fire damage, and found that far too many mobs are resistant against fire. Skul's wand was a nice upgrade, and it also looks nice, a skull-tipped wand. Finally I received the Royal Tribunal Cloak, another nice upgrade. That is the one advantage of being "newly" 60, the chance of some loot dropping in a high-level dungeon being an upgrade to your existing gear is quite high at the start. Part of the reluctance of "older" level 60 to go to places like Stratholme is that they are less likely to find anything for them there. Blizzard promised to not only make these dungeons harder, but to also improve the loot there, and have more epics drop. Remains to be seen how this is balanced, and whether it will make these dungeons more attractive for some people. Anyway, most of my guild enjoyed this weekends "easy" raids, you don't always want to be forced to play at the maximum of your abilities.
Our UBRS raid went very smooth, but I didn't get any loot except one green trash weapon which more than covered the repair cost. The interesting thing was how we developed a new tactic to empty the room of General Drakkisath. There are several mixed groups of dragonkin and orcs there, which are quite tough. We always pull them out of the room and over the bridge into the previous room, to avoid adds. But this time somebody in the raid said that you could drop the orcs off the bridge with mind control, and we tried that. It kind of works, you can mind control an orc and have him walk off the bridge, falling into LBRS. But NPCs don't suffer fall damage, and don't even die if you drop them into the lava. So the orc just respawns in Drakki's room a minute later, with his aggro list cleared. That has the advantage that you can split the group and kill the mind controlled orc later, but the disadvantage that the "in combat" flag of the group doesn't clear before the orc is dead.
The last raid for the weekend was a second Scholomance raid. This time I was the only priest in the raid, which made things a bit harder, but we managed. Only one wipe, when we found out the hard way that without a special quest item you can't clear the students in the viewing room. At first there was nothing interesting in the loot department for me, as I didn't want to roll on the 3 necropile items from the warlock set that dropped (they are cloth, but have too much stamina bonus, not enough int/spirit for a priest). But then the final boss dropped the Devout Crown, so with the bracers from Strat and the belt I bought in the AH I'm up to 3 items from my tier 0 set.
So all in all I had a lot of fun, and got a lot of good loot. Two more weeks to go until patch 1.10, and I'm having mixed feelings. On the one side I will miss the easy guild strolls through Stratholme and Scholomance, these two places will suffer the most in my opinion from being capped to 5. LBRS is easy enough with 10, UBRS will be hard but still possible, and to BRD I already often went in a 5-man group and it was okay. On the other hand, the respec to holy and the priest improvements will make Kyroc a better healer. As shadow priest I was struggling to keep a whole raid alive as only priest, and all situations where I am the only priest will improve after the patch. Raids with several priests I will need to learn a new skill, interrupting my own healing spells, as the addons to automatically interrupt spells (like the mana conserve of CTRaisAssist) under certain conditions (like your target not missing enough health) will be disabled in the patch. So either I learn to interrupt my spells manually if my target gets healed by somebody else, or I waste a lot of mana.
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