Happy 4th!

First, happy 4th of July! Whee, hooray, fireworks and all that!

Second, another word on damage. I remembered to SS my dps meter after the mech run I did last night.
That's an Affliction 'lock in #2 spot, and a Rogue of unknown spec in #3. I'm going to make the disclaimer that our tank was kind of sub-par and the only member that could go all-out DPS without dying (thank you Feign Death) was me... but if you think for a second that that's not part of a Hunter's bag of DPS tricks, you're most definitely wrong.

Nethermancer Sepethrea is a really difficult fight, as anyone who's been there can attest to. She herself hits like a little girl, but kiting those elementals while DPSing is a formidable task.

BRK's favorite trick of doing the Nethermancer pull from Panthaleon's room is unfortunately no longer possible. She'll reset as soon as she sets foot on the bridge, meaning you have to fight her where she stands and deal with kiting those bloody elementals in that tiny room.

Panthaleon was kind enough to drop half of my Arcatraz key, and this little beauty: Abacus of Violent Odds. Having two Rapid Fires I can call on anytime I like is just too delicious.

Shadow Labs, hunter power, and loot (phat)

After finishing Sethekk Halls and getting my Shadow Labs key, it seemed like the logical next thing to do, so as soon as someone asked in Guild about an SL run, I was the first to volunteer my services.

We ended up with a very odd party indeed. Two Hunters (the other was a Marksman with a wolf casting that Ferocious Howl move), two Shadow Priests, one of whom donned healing gear and played the healbot, and a pugged Warrior later replaced by a Druid after my esteemed Priest colleague sent him running home with insults. I thought he did pretty well and the problem was more one of the absurd amount of aggro a Shadow priest can generate, but apparently he thought differently.

Obviously rather short on crowd control, I feel we did very well - no trash pulls (not even Blackheart the Inciter's 6-pulls) managed to wipe us, and we chain-trapped and mind controlled like pros.

We had a total of four wipes, one on each of the bosses while we worked out our strategy - the first boss's fear move really really sucks, Blackheart's group mind-control-slash-aggro-wipe is nothing short of a sickening pain in the ass, and Grandmaster blueberry summoner is just a joke if you set your hunters on killing all the voidwalkers on the kiting path. Our wipe on Murmur was bad luck (we tried to 4-man it while the shadow priest was afk), the healer became the bomb and couldn't get LOS on the tank quickly enough after getting back.

Oh, and uh...