*snif*

Oi, I can't seem to shake this cold and it's got me at a low energy level all the time lately. It's spread to everybody in the family now and the additional stress isn't helping either. Yesterday, Mrs. Beros needed rest in the afternoon, so I took the kids out to soccer in the rain, then juggled a variety of distractions to keep them entertained through dinner. It was also our regular "clean up the house before the cleaning lady comes" night. So, I've just been tired when I get on.

At least we managed to knock off Heroic Arcatraz for the Trials questline last night. On Saturday night, on top of all the being-sick stress, we had another adolescent blow-up in the house as well. We haven't had one of these in awhile, but I missed a couple of raid nights last winter with these kind of events. I suspect it's just part of being the parent of a teenager, but it really takes the energy out of you.

Which was really a shame on Sat. I had really hoped to build on the energy of forming the new guild to see about getting more raiding together again. But I ended up delayed over an hour, there weren't a lot of people around still then, and I didn't have the energy left to do a proper cheerleading/recruiting job.

There were a few still high-energy people around on Sat, so we actually did an alt-ZA run. We had a tank and healer that hadn't been on a speed run in months, 3 healers total including a recent-70 alt, and of the 5 dps the 2 mains were both Enh Shamans and the other 3 were alts. In spite of all that, we still cleared the 3rd chest with 4m to spare. Swap in a 6th dps and with a perfect run in full flasks/buffs, we'd probably be within a minute of the bear mount. I think it resets on Wednesday and maybe we'll try an improv bear mount run then.

The other current project is the Champion title before the patch. We'll have two possible cracks at the Magtheridon part -- tonight and then sometime in the nex week. I think a few of us are ready tonight and a few others may be able to get in the last Trials quest tonight before the regular l8raid time. So I'm planning to try to drum up a pick-up Mag raid tonight. For the people with a few steps to go, we can run some more heroics next week and try to do another Mag run next weekend.

I'll still tentatively try for SSC ventures for Vashj this week. But with one week, the Hand of A'dal title is pretty much out of reach, so it might be just as well to wait for next week. All reports coming in from the PTR indicate that dps is getting raised 10-30% across the board and mob/boss health is getting knocked down significantly. It's almost like Blizz wants to make all of BC basically easy mode for a month so we can run through the content before the expansion releases.

I'm also waiting to see how much they knock down Ret pally dps. It's pwning everything on the PTR still, I hear. But if it looks like I can still pull >1k dps, maybe I'll go Ret at 3.0 and relieve some of the logjam we've always had at tank. I suspect the prot warriors, Dethno/Bloc/Ragon will be happy to bust out their new AoE tanking, high-dps/high-threat skillz. We'll see in a week.