Saviour of Azeroth.

Undying Resolution has finished up T13 as the number one 25 man guild on Elune. That's... phenomenal. The feeling is far beyond my depth of expression; awestruck is probably the best adjective to label it. When Deathwing fell and the achievement spam blew up guild chat, I turned to Beef and whispered, "This is by far the most amazing thing I've experienced in WoW."

(No offense, Shadowmourne, you're still a wonderful milestone!)

As someone who raided sporadically and was more enraptured by lore prior to joining UR, I'm still pinching myself in disbelief. We did it! We worked cohesively to beat the hardest content that Blizzard has published to date, while the other raiding guilds on our server splintered off into running Heroic DS in 10m because it's easier.* This accomplishment is exceptionally kick-butt because a good chunk of my guildmates, too, have never experienced the feeling of being a raider in a top guild. So there was a general sense of wonder in the air rather than jaded boredom. I hope we keep that same sense of wonder, and our drive to accomplish bigger and better things, as we progress in the next tier of raiding.

Bring it on, Pandaville - we're Saviours of Azeroth!

* "Easy" is subjective; I don't look down on people who choose to raid in a strict 10 environment, nor do I personally think that 10m equals automatic easy mode because personal accountability is key. But your mileage may vary.

I was also a very lucky Death Knight who won one of the two Life-Binder's Handmaidens that dropped that fateful night.

Enthusiastic Aesadonna is enthusiastic!

Things have been busy for Team UR; we killed Heroic Zon'ozz on 7/25, which was the final boss barring us from working on Heroic Spine! In atypical UR fashion, the kill was quite memorable!

Dargons everywhere! And Thiala (and Gizzy's!) butt. XD

You see these dragons fighting? It was the weirdest glitch I've ever experienced in a raid! It all started with one Force of Destruction (from the Hour of Twilight instance) spawning in the room with Zon'ozz. He flew around erratically as we cleared trash, much to the amusement of myself and the annoyance of others. I even jokingly called him "our good luck charm" on Real ID.

And then, another spawned! After that, a  Dream Warden appeared and engaged in epic battle with the two Black dragons. Unfortunately, two-on-one wasn't a fair fight and our green friend died quickly. The two remained dragons remained until our first wipe, when they despawned.

6/8, holla!

This was our lovely kill. I mentioned "UR fashion", which translates "half the raid is down and our DoTs are why the boss is dead." As you can see, I'm one dead Derp Kn00b. (Dying with a boss who has less than 5% is my thing, I guess, haha)

We've been working on Heroic Spine for the past two weeks, which is HARD. The first week, I remained a Frost DK and helped our Blood DK on AoEing the massive amount of Corrupted Blood that exists after stripping the second Plate.

The second week, I was asked by our GM to swap to Unholy for the valuable raid cooldown Anti-Magic Zone. I haven't had an Unholy spec since Tier 11, so I felt clunky and lost for a good portion of the night. I even did the worst thing ever and accidentally replaced the button I had for AMZ with Summon Gargoyle. Having to sheepishly explain my mistake and apologize was pretty embarrassing, but I guarantee it's something I'll never do again!

We're getting to about 25%, which is pretty decent. Hopefully we'll have a kill soon and we'll be that much closer to becoming Saviours of Azeroth before Pandaville is upon us!

My little lolcat

On another tangent, this pretty little Worgen is my future Herald of the Titans toon! One of my new guildmates, Hestiah, threw out the idea of putting together an Alliance-side run and I immediately pestered Beefbus for us to get in on it!

Beef, Amowrath, and I have been running Wrath dungeons like crazy to get gear. Setsunai is a Feral Druid, which feels similar and different all at the same time! I look forward to see what goes down later this month and you bet I'll be updating about the trials and tribulations that I didn't experience while it was "current."

Speaking of Hestiah, look at what she sent me! (Illidan is missing; he's on my computer desk. :-D)

After raid, I ran a dungeon with Ponerya, Beef, Hestiah, and Amo. Pon mention refilling her Lich King cup while we took a small break and I lamented the fact that my home state lacked the gas station that stocked the WoW cups. She said that her state too lacked the gas station and that a Twitter friend set her a set of the cups, which I thought was the coolest thing.

Hestiah then mentioned that she had a couple extra sets and she'd send me one. I freaked! When I asked her how much I owed her and she told me nothing! That... blew my mind. Here's a new guildie, someone that I hardly knew, and she was kind enough to send me a set of cups for free, just because I wanted them! BRB, CRYING FOREVER. Silliness aside, I'm still really touched.

I was a little starstuck to meet an awesome blogger!

Last night, Beef and I met Navimie of The Daily Frostwolf! She's on a mission to meet people from the WoW Blogosphere and get a screen shot with them. It was kind of a crazy happenstance that we met at all, but it was a really nice experience! :-) Sorry for my emoticon spam; I'm kind of um, famous in the guild for constantly making faces. XD; 

You can read her entry on meeting me and Beef here, which I thought was cute. Look out Liss, Pon, and Juv - she'll be coming for you!

Heroic Camaraderie.

As of June 28th, I can say that I have a Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn kill under my belt! This was actually Undying Resolution's second H Blackhorn kill, but I was absent from their first. But hey, it's still exciting!  

The kill itself was hard won. As Rebirther in the left hand corner of my UR states, I personally ate up 2/3 of our battle resurrections. Twilight Barrage is no joke! Death #1 came from me eating the Barrage by myself while my health was low. Death #2 came from stacking with everyone else for Twilight Onslaught while retaining the debuff from Barrage. Ouch! Nonetheless, I now know what not to do in the future so I can an asset, rather than a floor board connoisseur. 

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Sunday, July 1st was an "Old World" night. The main event was Icecrown Citadel (10), which I'm sure survey would say that I am absolutely insane for trekking back into ICC after assembling Shadowmourne. I say pshaw to that! 

I didn't personally need any achievements other than Neck Deep in Vile, but these days, I'm just happy to hang out with my guildies. :-) Several guildies got their Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquishers and I got to "off-tank" both Heroic Lady Deathwhisper and The Lich King, since I was the only Plate wearer in the group.

Off-tanking Lich King was actually one of the more "OMG, yay!" things I've done recently. I'm still scratching my head at how we were able to pull off Been Waiting a Long Time for This with my crappy Frosty aggro management, but it made me feel accomplished that we did. Tanking, even in this silly DPS-form, is scary to me. I don't like to disappoint, so I shy away from roles of leadership because of the anxiety riding on that feeling of potentially letting down a group of people.

Ironically, I had no problems with healing for all the years that I did. *shrug* The human mind is a strange thing, indeed!

 

Since ICC doesn't take a full two hours, we did several other mini-raids to occupy ourselves. Since a chunk of us lacked the achievement, we went into Vault of Archavon to get Earth, Wind, & Fire. It was a great success!

Vent led to reminiscing about Wrath and how this achievement was way too hard to obtain. I always feel a little sad when people share memories about expansions past because my ability to raid was so sporadic, due to bouncing from sever-to-server, guild-from-guild. Fiannah, my former healer, was only able to see Naxx and Trial of the Crusader before Cataclysm hit. Hell, Aesadonna didn't even step foot into any Wrath five-man dungeon while they were current content!

Those were dark days.

After VoA, we slayed Sartharion (25) and I was the lucky winner of the Twilight Drake. Score!

Considering that I also won anything I rolled on for transmog the entire night, Venat teased me about my luckiness. I really should have bought a lottery ticket that night, haha.

This and that.

Remember when I said that UR is currently 3/8 in Heroic Dragon Soul?

I lied.

4/8, baby!

With our Heroic Ultraxion kill, Undying Resolution is officially ranked 3rd on Elune for 25m Heroic progression! As we function on a lightweight, two mandatory raiding days a week schedule, I find it most impressive. 

Other than UR's super-awesome-heroic-progression-of-amazingness, all's been quiet on the Aesadonna front. Why? Because these two little ladies have caught my attention.

Vakarian, my baby Fury Warrior, is who I've been playing about 85% of the time. She's part of a (mostly) dungeon leveling duo; Beef's Hunter, Kirrahe, is her other half. I haven't ran consistently dungeons as a lowbie toon since Vanilla and I think I've witnessed pretty much everything now. Rogues in cloth heirlooms? Check! A Mage beating my Need roll on a BoP Strength/Stamina necklace? Yep! Tanks who can't hold aggro to save our lives? All too frequently. But despite the minor bumps, it's relaxing to spend some time on WoW with Beef that isn't dedicated to raiding.

Oh, and there's nothing cooler than when a random PUGer comments positively on our toon names--WE ARE LEGION. *cough*

And then there's Fiannah.  Killing people with my mind instead of a sharp, pointy object is a fun change of pace! I've been dragging her to UR's alternate 10m Dragon Soul since it makes me feel bad when I let her collect too thick of a layer of dust. Our little group achieved our Destroyer's End titles last Monday after a flawless run, which was extra satisfying as the team were so damn close to downing Deathchin the week before. 

But don't worry Aesa, you're still my favourite. ♥ 

Movin' Forward.

So this happened last night...

*insert unintelligible screaming here*

Undying Resolution is now officially 3/8 in H 25m Dragon Soul.

Oh, and we also brought our old bane, H Ultraxion, down to 3% health as well. Perhaps there IS a light at the end of the tunnel, after all.

Frustration.

On the bright side, I was able to get in on a Heroic Hagara kill last Wednesday. UR defeated her last week as a guild for the first time, but I had missed out due to the Real Life Aggro Machine. So, yay, acheesement! And double yay for one-shotting her. :-)

Ignore my hot (extra) dead body, that witch decided to nuke me at 2% during our final lightning phrase.

And now, for the part in which Aesadonna whines mercilessly about Heroic Ultraxion progression.

Never have I felt like such a failure in my seven years of playing this game. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the best Death Knight out there, hell, I'm grateful to my guildies and the officer core for putting up with my shenanigans. But for the most part, I'm competent. Even while H Ultra is completely borking my frame rate and actually freezing my computer due to the lack of optimization of the fight itself, I'm still able to pop into blood presence and furiously smash the defense cooldowns needed to soak the Hour of Twilight as directed with a relatively good rate of success. My derpocity doesn't extend to not being able to press buttons, or I doubt I'd still be a raider.

But rather, it seems like no matter what the hell I do, I can't break over 34k DPS. I average 32, or 29-30 whenever I have to fight my computer more substantially. I'm expected to do 36k minimum and I'm nowhere close, even whilst adding Golemblood Potions to my rotation. The fight itself doesn't pander to the strengths of a Frost Death Knight, but there has to be something I'm missing. I'm so desperate at this point that I've considered dropping my 2nd PvP spec and testing the waters with Unholy, since I have a Gurth'alak. Or even attempting Masterfrost, though apparently that's a hot mess if you don't get the rotation just right. I feel like I'm running out of options.

I just can't stand the thought of being a liability, it's sucking the fun out of the game. Kind of ironic that I used to complain about my ex-guild's lack of enthusiasm for the game outside of raiding, but I think I understand now.

In Happier News!

When I logged into WoW this morning, Beef had a Swift Lovebird waiting in my mailbox! *cheesy grin* It is an in-game tradition for him to send me a shiny during Love is the the Air, stemming back from when we were wee little level 40 Blood Elves and he surprised me with a Pink Hawkstrider for V-Day '07. (You may know those elves as the Draenei Duo Nathadan and Fiannah. We go way back!)

Gratuitous kill shots (+ rambling!)

It's no secret that I love taking screen shots; they're the WoW equivalency of a photograph, capturing a moment for you to relive. Kill shots are amongst my absolute favourite things to "snap" -- being able to savour that accomplishment all over again and to see how you've grown as a player are wonderful feelings. This is Aesadonna's raiding journey through the Cataclysm.