Ready steady rhino!

I apologise for how flaky I’ve been about blogging this week and for the greater than usual quantity of incoherent random in my posts – I’ve been high on life, 80 and piggysniffle medication. The sky’s the limit, as long as you don’t forget to cast slowfall. But I’m nudging good health again which means long days of doing nothing except playing WoW are over. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I’ve quite enjoyed just ploughing a massive amount of time into the game without any particular feelings of guilt or shame about it, since trying to see people would be vastly antisocial (hello, lovely to see you, I’ve brought a bottle and some swine-flu) and I was too ill to be able to concentrate on doing anything remotely demanding. There has been a more marked sense of progress than I’m usually conscious of – which is compelling – but life-WoW balance is important to me.

I’ve also lost the blogsphere plot so Friday links are temporarily going to have to become Saturday links. I have a lot of reading to catch up on now my brain is semi-functional again.

A combination of hitting 80 and acquiring a guild has really transformed the game for us. Although the spanner-to-sane ratio is not as high as it could be, everyone is at least friendly and willing. And by sheer dint of being moderately competent (most of the time, well, M’Pocket tank especially, I’m, y’know, me) we’ve found ourselves in a semi-privileged, not entirely deserved position. The main advantage is that you can put together a group for pretty much anything within minutes. There are still only 3 80s, including us, but there’s a run of people in the mid 70s so currently we’re hitting Northrend instances and Outland heroics. The truly weird thing is that we’re healer heavy. I could dual-spec shadow of course but I’m kind of committed to standing at the back in a sissy robe.

I suppose I could stand at the back wreathed in purest shadow, spilling forth fel-wee to smite my enemies but… nah. It’s just not the same. Felwee.wordpress.com…. I don’t think it’s me.

Yesterday we ran BFD on our alts with a guildie and Gundrak on our 80s, and it really emphasised the differences between old world instances and Northrend instances. BFD is huge, sprawling, contains about 83 bosses (well, maybe not 83) and, hell, it’s bloody hard. We were 3-manning, at level (admittedly the guildie wasn’t entirely on the ball, in fact he was so far from the ball it’s possible he was playing checkers) and the combination of size, scope, fleeing murlocs, and large groups of casters makes it damn near lethal. And I stance-danced. I’ve never stance-danced before. I am very much a noobtank but it felt like it was some rite of passage. A hasty hamstring and then ducking back behind my shield. Now try to flee into a large group of mobs, El Murloc!

Gundrak, by contrast, is just a big wheel you walk round, looking at the exhibits on your left and right. On the other hand, whoever designed it was clearly on crack, which redeems it rather in my eyes. I think it’s tactically less interesting and significantly less demanding than BDF but it is also chockablock with rhinos.

Rhinos!

Rhinos!

And there’s the boss who turns into mammoth. Least intimidating transformation sequence ever. I shall make myself FLUFFY with CUTE LI’LL HORNS and you will tremble, oh adventurers of Azeroth. Actually he nearly did for us because I was incapacitated with laughter and therefore almost failed to heal through his mammothian foot stomp. Ironically, the footstomp came literally the second after I slashmocked so I think he was making a point.

Seriously … though … rhinos?

Also occasionally we would face not one but two Jormungar worms rhinos.

And why do you occasionally get a poison-style DoT from them? In what way are rhinos poisonous? My god, are those trolls cross breeding them with SNAKES?! The sick bastards!

By the time we reached the final boss, we’d all gone rhino-crazy, which manifested in replacing arbitrary words with the word rhino, extra points if the word originally began with ‘r’. We weren’t having readychecks, we were having rhinochecks. Is everybody rhino? Rhino! Rhino! Rhino!

Of course, Gal’darah had to join in. “You wanna see power? I’m gonna show you power!” he bellowed, promptly turning into … a … yes, you get it.

That completely finished me. I was practically crying with laughter. But somehow I managed to type: “you wanna see rhino! I’m gonna show you rhino!”

And then he impaled me on his mighty rhino horn, right in the innuendo.

Ouch.