Maalus Imbued: So long pal...

Isn’t it always the way? You find a new blog that you really enjoy, only to find it seems like it has been wound up with no posts for the last few months. Happened to me a few times. Well, just in case they decide to start things up again, if you get a chance and especially if you are currently trying to conquer SF raid content, it’s well worth a visit to The Wimpy Dirge. Scarletto, I hope you start things up again soon so I can keep reading about you and your guild.

So, onto what I’ve been up to. Raiding was fun last night. We finally got Maalus Imbued down in Palace. It’s the first hard mode we have ever got down and took quite a few tries before everything clicked in to place and the fight went remarkably smoothly. Well, for me it did. For those who don’t know the fight, Maalus puts the spell ‘Living Death’ on random members of the raid every minute. It can only be cured using the wand that you get from killing the previous mob in the zone. However, the cooldown on that wand is one minute thirty seconds meaning that as the fight goes on you lose more and more members to being charmed by Maalus and not enough time to cure them all. So that’s why the fight was easy for me. I had gotten through all of our previous pulls without being touched by the charm more than once. Sods law that the time we get him down I was charmed about 20 seconds in to the fight and remained so until the end.

Living Death: Maalus Imbued charms you!

The person given the task of curing the charm using the wand decided to save the timer and not use it on me, leaving me charmed for the whole fight. I actually think that was a wise move. Aside from bringing some extra DPS, there are a lot more important folk in that battle than the Brawler. We already had an off tank so I wasn’t needed to control the adds and as such was a bit surplus really. So a wise move not using the wand. It meant that the next charm that hit (which I think was on our Mystic) the wand was free and not on cooldown, so that was cured quickly.

I don’t want to sound patronising as our raid force does have some exceptional players, but I guess I’m really proud of the gang pulling together like that. If you have never done a hard mode SF raid mob before, they can be quite tricky and really are at times ‘hard’ indeed. I think our next hard mode target will be Toxx, then perhaps one in Labs. Hopefully those will go as well as the Maalus fight. We’ve hit Toxx hard mode before but to be honest we weren’t really ready for her a few months prior to Christmas when we tried. I think the encounter shouldn’t hold too many issues for us nowadays. I want to head back to Underfoot again too. Killing just a couple of the nameds isn’t good enough and for some reason I have a burning desire to have the zone cleared before Velious comes out. Don’t think it will happen but one can dream.

On Saturday night I took the Acolytes of Valor crew on an historic raid as we headed to the Spirits of the Lost raid in Cazic Thule. Voltaan tanked it and we had exactly two groups. I think only myself and my Bro had the Marrs Chosen quest to complete (Voltaan had never done the zone even though I have countless times on other toons). I did put the details for the Froglok timeline on our guild webby so those that wanted to do it could do so. But I guess the promise of some raid fun was the most important bit anyhow. We really did have a blast, although I will say that although Voltaan (and a couple of other 90’s that came along to join the fun) were mentored down so that the main nameds were actually yellow to us, the fights were absolutely no challenge at all. Even on the last pull of the night, which turned out to be a “Whoops! Who pulled Venekor? Watch out! Here comes his statue buddy!” type of situation, it literally took me a couple of seconds to grab aggro of both and from thereon in it was pretty much a simple burn fight.

I think I will have to look at resurrecting one of my not so ‘fully kitted in T2’ toons to start tanking the historic raids I will be running most weekends, so I don’t get the feeling we are just going through the motions. I must say I prefer a bit more of a battle than that. Aside from this though it was a really great night indeed. Mostly for me because my Bro seemed to enjoy it and I know it was his first raid since he had returned to the game just before Christmas. Now both Merecraft and Voltaan are Heroes of Kugup! Next Saturday it’s going to be Vyemm and then Harla Dar just to help a guildy on one of his alts. I wonder if I have time to resurrect Killzum the ole Zerker troll to tank that one.

Be well.