YABMR

YABMR = "yet another bear mount run" for anybody for whom that isn't obvious. The next bear mount run was another "by the skin of our teeth" affair.

On Monday, I got on late and probably because of that we didn't have 6 of our usual bear mount run dps crew around. We debated 2 improvisations -- either Dethno goes dps, or Bloc brings Phage to replace the sleeping Sherider. The former is actually probably higher dps, but we're used to having a second mage for sheeping and only one melee dps (and we had one since Uglykid is enhancement this week). I realized that I don't remember anymore why one melee dps is better and I think it might only be true for Malacrass actually, but we went with Phage anyway for sheep and AoE.

Things seemed to be going on the slow side intially, probably just due to some lack of focus as the run gets more routine. Then Hawksy died right before the bear boss. IIRC, one of the sheep broke and there was some confusion about dps/resheep/taunt. Just in case, I swapped in my healing weapon and supported Barantir through the rest of the mobs. We rezzed Hawksy and found ourselves about 2m behind pace starting the Dragonhawk trash.

Nothing went wrong exactly through the trash, but every single extra scout spawned on us and the pats were all in the worst possible places. Which was making us slightly anxious about time when we pulled Jan'alai. And then we had a "noob mage" confusion moment where Phage accidentally killed the wrong hatcher after pulling only half the eggs.

So that's a problem. We have 1.5 sides of eggs to hatch and we usually at the 35% release-em-all point during the second hatcher, so we're going to have to adjust the dps. We popped all the eggs on the other side, then quickly switch and popped the rest at 35%. Somewhere in there Phage got hisself blown up, which slowed the dps rate down to about the right level anyway. But we were at under 14m when the boss went down.

Normally, we're at 16m there and have a few minutes to spare/slow-down at the Lynx, but we're going to have to go balls out the rest of the way. So we did and we also finally got friendly pat placements on the way to Halazzi.

Even so, we were all chugging pots to avoid drinking and basically had to chain pull the 3 groups and boss in rapid succession in the Lynx room. I was worried about the healers' mana, so I spent every moment not taunting the Spirit of the Lynx with my hand poised over the LoH button in case of a spike on Dethnotronic.

And somehow we pulled it off with barely seconds to spare. So grats Barantir on the mount and I suppose even when it might not be exciting, it can still be exciting.

On Tuesday, I was feeling fatigued from both teaching and the cold I seem to be coming down with and couldn't quite bring myself to take a shot at forming up 25 for a l8raid. It's a bit challenging to generate the enthusiasm to try to fire up a raid with Warhammer and the expansion/beta as constant distractions for our raiders. Similarly, I took Wednesday off entirely and tried to catch up some on sleep.

Tonight, we'll do another bear run before people get distracted by the weekend. I'll see if I can get a raid going Saturday night maybe (more Vashj?). I ought to be able to get back in the swing of things by next week. We've got a month before the expansion and it'd still be nice to get in another kill or two, or maybe hand out a few last pieces of loot to level with.