The PvP Milestone

I got several PvP achievements all at once tonight. I notched my 1,000th honorable kill, killed Thrall, and earned my Black War Bear. There are two possible scenarios with this. The first, and more likely scenario, is that Thrall was killed by some random DoT tick, and my 1,000th honor kill was one of the Horde players who tried to saved their beloved leader being nuked down by the raid. The second scenario, and the one I choose to believe took place, was that my 1,000th honor kill was Thrall himself, and that the last thing the Warchief saw before his death was my Royal Crest of Lordaeron coming in to cave in his skull. The second one is definitely the one I'm going to tell other people.

Death to the Warchief was the last of the For The Alliance! achievements I had left, and it was certainly the hardest to get. This was my fifth crack at Thrall. The previous four had all failed for various reasons, being launched at 3PM on a sunday, healer DCing, half the raid took a wrong turn, Senjin hexed the raid... I was begining to think I might not get Thrall down. But this raid group actually got it done. We went at 10:30 PM, had healers and MT and OT, and enough DPS to burn him down. Of course, there were still enough horde players on us that mage ports were out of the question for escape. So, like any good grad of paladin S.E.R.E. school, I bubble hearthed. Or, bubbled that is, it turned out there was still fifteen minutes on my hearth cooldown. At this point, things went haywire, the members of the raid who were still alive all bolted, and I was right with them. Unfortunately, I don't spend a lot of time in Orgrimmar, so I wound up running the long way, out the front gate, through the cloud of players by the bank and AH. I managed to survive that with trinket cooldowns, and made it to the front gate. Whereupon I was promptly murdered by a swarm of angry duellists. Right, Orgrimmar is their Ironforge...

I'm still really strapped for cash while leveling my new professions, so I opted not to hit on the spirit healer. 35% damage to an epic tanking set is fatal to the wallet. I ran back to my corpse, bubbled away from the duellists, and got a screenshot of my Zorro-esque escape from Orgrimmar. I bolted across Durotar and the Barrens on my crusading charger, hopped the boat in Ratchet, and fly to Stormwind from Booty Bay. I checked by mail, and found a grateful letter from my liege, King Varian Wrynn, and also found a Black War Bear. The mailbox is like Mary Poppins' purse I guess, much bigger on the inside. After extricating the very large bear from the very small box, I took him for a test drive, culminating in this stop in Stormwind's Valley of Heroes. He runs like a dream, thank you very much.