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Had a busy weekend, not least due to WoW-activities. Friday was our second attempt at the Black Morass.

A while ago, coming off the success of Old Hillsbrad, we went into the Morass to try the second part of the Caverns of Time. …It didn’t go well. It’s a very tough and demanding encounter. Yeah, one. You clear some of the surrounding area, talk to Medivh (who really needs to relax…), and the Infinite Dragonflight shows up. The party has to take down elites that show up out of portals, when the elite is down, the portal closes, and the next portal opens. There’s eighteen portals with the sixth, twelfth, and eighteenth having bosses instead of normal elites. This keeps the party busy, and doesn’t provide much chance for rest.

Oh, did I mention that the portals release a steady stream of non-elites who go straight for Medivh that have to be killed before they can take the shield protecting him down?

We could get to about the fifth wave or so before being overwhelmed. This time things were a bit different. Blanc and Dunain were not yet 70 when we tried it, and overall equipment is better now.

Blanc, me, Grumbly, Blondiewood, and Noxlux went in…. And we still couldn’t do it. We did several attempts, and had various problems. We did get tantalizingly close, getting all the way to the 17th wave… which we were still taking down when the last boss showed up. We were just in too poor of a shape to bounce back, but we were close. All the other attempts generally fell apart around the second boss.

It was annoying, especially so since it was obvious we *could* do it, but just couldn’t get all the way through the fight to the end.

Saturday was an Underbog run for Shrimpette. It went smoothly, except for the end. For some reason, the Black Stalker put the party through the ringer, killing three people, and with Blondie succumbing to a damage-over-time right afterwards, leaving Nox to rez everyone.

After that, we decided to take one more try at the Black Morass. With some alt-shuffling, we ended up with the same team as Friday, except switching out Noxlux for Asclepius. This was a help, since Asc has completed Black Morass with pick-up groups (I still don’t understand how…).

The strategy was the same as previous, and close to the standard: Blanc tanks the elites, Blondie and I grind them down with damage, Asc keeps us healed, Grumbly sticks near the Dark Portal and takes out the non-elites on their way in. Sometimes I take them out when Grumbly needs a break. Note that Grumbly was doing his own healing with bandages and the such.

An interesting note by the way, the second boss is immune to Taunt… but not to Growl. Lance pulled him off of Blanc very easily.

The first time… did not go well. We ended up with multiple portals open and spewing out critters after the second boss. We think it may have gotten up to three, and we burned it back down to two before it fell apart on us.

With it having been a close thing, and that being something no one else has mentioned, we decided that might have been a bug, and reset the instance and tried again despite it being later than everyone really wanted to stay up.

And it was… an amazingly smooth run. Everything went smoothly, we powered our way through the last few waves in record time and were well prepared for the last boss… who wasn’t prepared for us. ^_^

Sunday was a Guild barbecue hosted by Thermi and Jariedthe. Sadly some bad news threw a wet blanket on the celebration (I don’t think it’s my place to say more here), but we managed a good time anyway.decided to make a new Blood Elf warlock, and everyone else followed suit, giving us a party of five new blood elves of various classes dashing from place to place denuding the landscape of monsters wherever we went (Locusts of the Fickle Muse…). It was confusing, unorganized, and silly fun.