Those of you who have been reading along (hello, all 2 of you!) know I’ve only recently started running heroics. A disastrous (by which I mean ‘everyone wiped on the first pull, twice’) attempt at heroic Blood Furnace scared me off heroics for a while; please note this was my first heroic. Given some advice by Mishkar, and some new gear, I decided to try them again. Ran a successful heroic Ramps a day or two ago, and last night, bolstered by the fact that it was the daily (as well as the thought of new, if hideously ugly, pants) made me take a shot at heroic BF again.

Grabbed Vandersloot since he was already in my group due to an amusingly bad attempt to down the invisible undead magic ghost dragon of Shadowmoon Valley, and picked up some other people (a warrior, a pally, and a priest) and off we went. I knew we were in for something special when our priest’s last buff turned out to be, well, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

But no, seriously, it was fun. The first pull was shades of last time, and we still have no idea what happened there, but after that it was great. Granted, our warrior has an immense repair bill because he kept finding the rogues with his face. The actual boss encounters, though, were really quite easy (including, or perhaps especially, Kel’idan the Breaker), and at no point were any corpse runs made; no actual drops for me aside from the blood for the quest and the usual BoJs, except for, oh wait, the Eight of Blessings. Proceeds from the sale of the Eight of Blessings will be going straight to my epic flying training fund.

After we cleared it, there was some talk of a heroic SP run, but everyone kind of drifted off… I went to put things on the AH, and the pally reinvited me to a group, along with two warriors and a druid from his guild. Fun! We were running heroic Ramps, which I really needed for the reputation (getting Subtlety is going to make me really hate fel orcs), so off we went.

The trash pulls were really pretty smooth. We took down Watchmaster with little to no difficulty, then on Omor I made a boneheaded mistake (I blame the late hour): I didn’t realize the tree druid was right behind me, and so I didn’t move when I got hit with Bane of Treachery and thus blew up the druid. Whoops. We wiped. Still, we came back and actually won very handily!

Then we went over to fight Nazan and Vazruden, and when Vazruden landed he immediately went for the tree. Chop chop goes the axe, tree goes down before the pally even has a chance to react (though he did nearly have himself healed, to his credit). We regroup, run back, and notice one of our warriors is disconnected. But we can 4-man Vazruden, right? Well sure we can, if he doesn’t bug out. We got the Infinitely Respawning Sentry Bug, which we finally got around by blowing them up simultaneously, then fought Vazruden, who immediately aggroed the tree again (despite several valiant attempts by our paladin), while his dragon concentrated on breathing fire on me and only me. Turns out a single warrior and a paladin isn’t enough to take down Vaz! Go figure.

So we left, but it wasn’t all bad. I got invited to their Saturday alt-gearing Kara raids (led by the above paladin, who I promise is better than it sounds - two or three bad deaths in Ramparts counts against nothing, he’s actually the best prot pally I’ve grouped with), and a standing invite to their guild as well. What can I say? I’m thinking about it.

Oh - and I’m Affliction again.