Sorry Rhidach, but... GREAT NEWS EVERYBODY!

I took a vacation, along the way, I met up with several guild members and former guild members while in the Orange County area, this caused my raid schedule to be a little eclectic. However, the raiding the past week has been awesome.

I flew out on Friday, and hung out with some friends and family in the bay area. Then on Monday, I flew to LA, and was greeted by the shaman officer in my guild who was kind enough to not only put a roof over my head for the night, but also let me ride along on his Internet connection for the raid that night.

Monday is the night we clean up progression objectives. Because we had already facerolled all of ICC 25 on Wednesday, we were cleaning up progression objectives that had escaped our grasp back when the content was relevant. On Monday, we cleaned up Yogg-Saron, probably the source of the most bitching and gquits in our guild's history. We had about half of the raid that had never seen Yogg on any difficulty. We two shotted it, and the one wipe was due to a hunter not having his particle effects turned up, and hitting about all the clouds within 20 seconds of pulling.

It felt good to finally drop something that had been bedeviling the guild for so long. Although part of me was disappointed it was so easy. We probably could have done it a long time ago.

We rolled through some ToGC 25 to finish up the raid period, we downed Jaraxxus right before we ran out of time, and he dropped a nice pair of 258 tanking pants. Because I've missed out on most of our marrowgar kills due to various issues, the other tanks all had the 264 tanking pants already, so I got it uncontested.

Then we put together a slapdash ToGC 10 group. Decked out in oddball items like Nexus War Champion Beads and Black Spire Sabatons, we decided to go for Dedicated Insanity. It was kinda an oddball thing to attempt, considering some of the hoops we had to go through, like having our fury warrior respec arms because he only had one weapon that met the criteria, having our feral druid who goes resto for CC on faction champs do so without gear in like 4 slots because his resto set is his relentless gladiator set. Somehow, we made it to Anub'arak without any wipes. Because we didn't want to deal with trying a new comp, we went ahead and did what we always do, we two healing it. With a resto shaman and a disc priest. I can't imagine what that must have felt like for them. We got him into phase three cleanly, but also with a couple adds up, which meant that the OT was going to be on a pair that won't be killed pretty early in the fight. The healing was intense. We wound up losing our feral druid pretty early on as the healers triaged, and the DPS took us through 4 freezing slashes, which is a nightmare for me, because all I can do is take everything on the chin during those. However, we managed to pull it off. We are now the only ten people on the server who have the Argent Defender title. I think I'm gonna keep wearing Starcaller for a while, but it's nice to have options.

On Tuesday, the Shaman and I went to go visit the Prodigal Resto Druid, and by extension, the rest of the exiles. As such we missed the ten man ICC 10. They two shotted Festergut, and then proceeded to painfully claw their way past Rotface. Having our Professional Hunter tanking on his DK, and our Utility Man stepping in on his undergeared hunter made things more difficult than they needed to be, and for that I feel kinda bad. But the food at Marie Callender's was so good. Anyways, they opted to not attempt Putricide until a better raid group showed up.

I missed most of Wednesday's raid due to travelling back home. They facerolled their way through the first four bosses, but then wiped for about two hours on Festergut. Meanwhile, I was cramming my 6'8" frame into a middle seat in coach on a 737, in between two fat guys who snored. Then I was waiting for my backpack to get unloaded off the plane, which apparently requires a crew of 12 to find. Then I got to play dodge the drunk homeless guy on the Link Light Rail. Then I had to suffer through the aural torture of bad guitar guy on the ferry. Then I had to drive home behind mister "I drive 10 miles under the speed limit in no passing zones!"

I arrived online about an hour before the end of raid time. They were struggling on Festergut, and asked me to step in the place of the lowest DPS so that Super Priest could come on his priest, and not his prot pally. I came in, and we wiped about two more times. Exhausted from my trip, and having traumatic flashbacks to Thaddius 25, and I just kinda snapped in vent. Angy Dammer was in full force. But something miraculous happened. Suddenly, it seemed as if every DPSer seemed to find an extra thousand DPS in them. Not having to rotate 5 cooldowns to have a tank survive the 3 inhale blitz probably helped too. Festergut went down, and we took a few exploratory pulls on Rotface, only fitting in three pulls, each with a different set of trash respawning in between them, we managed to get him down to about 18%. I'm confident we'll be able to down him on Monday. I apologized for my mass transit induced bloodlust, and formed up the ten man group. This time with the Professional Hunter on his hunter.

We walked into Putricide's lab with full Algalon protocols in effect. We were hermetically sealed within a vent channel that only I know the password to, stocked with full flasks and fish feasts. All non essential chat channels were left, and we went to work.

Putricide was unbelievably bugged on the PTR. It wasn't so bad on live, but we still lost 3 attempts to bugs. We had one attempt where the mutated abomination registered as a mount, and as such didn't have an independent action bar, we lost a couple of attempts to Putricide only spawning one slime pool at a time, which meant that the abom couldn't get enough ooze power to actually do anything of value. We lost one attempt to our resto shaman accidentally dropping a cleansing totem, which meant that every time that our abom came near the totem, the abom was cleansed off of him. It took some hard looking at the parses to figure that one out. Finally, we managed to get a clean pull, that pushed him into phase three. Phase three got a little weird, and I fucked up the tank taunting, so we wound up with much more raid damage than we needed to. We cut it to the razor's edge, with the bottom falling out at about one percent, when everyone else in the raid was killed off by the AoE, and the slime pools were everywhere. Only my co-tank and I were still alive, and we managed to burn the last 120k off of him for the kill.

Some crappy leather dropped, but so did the Unidentifiable Organ. I beat out the co-tank on the roll, and it's definitely going to replace the Heart of Iron on my Marrowgar/Festergut set.

During 3.2, after we had downed Algalon and Tribute to Insanity and just before the Exiles left, the Professional Hunter had a chat with me. He said he wanted our group to compete for server firsts in 3.3, which even on ten man had previously been the realm of guilds like Awaken, Crisis, and CSM. Well, we aren't competing for server firsts, we're taking them.