From MgT to M.Hyjal via the arena

As this blog's title suggests, it's been a bit of an odd week. Due to work I've barely managed an hour and half each night, but did manage two heroic MgT runs to max out Shortys SSO rep and even managed to get the expertise trinket Although Shorty doesn't need any gear from there now many guildies do and with our rogue CL taking 18 runs for his trinket and one of our locks is on 28 unsuccessful runs for his, so I can foresee many more runs in there.

On Tuesday night my lock and her ret pally partner screeched through 10 arena matches in under an thirty minutes - less than a minute between matches was pretty insane! Weekly tally was 5-5 but was enough to get her her S3 gloves on wednesday. She even got to take part in her first raid, of any type (she's not even keyed for kara), when I got called in to help on VR trash as they only had one warlock in the raid.

On friday I got called in to M.Hyjal. The guild had managed their second rage kill when one of the mages had an argument with his girlfriend and had to log. Although it was really odd to see somewhere new on my mage it was a nice introduction from the relatively relaxing position of ranged dps. Two tries on Anetheron, with a best of about 50%. If all goes well we'll head back in there this week with Shorty in some fire res gear to be infernal tank, I'm just hoping I can make the next Rage kill.

Mid-week I finally managed to get the mats for Shorty's red belt of battle. Although I have no inclination to respec him fury, I pride myself on being able to do decent dps when required and I've wanted this belt for ages. The change to making nethers boe made it possible. It took a few more nights of asking guildies to ask friends in several alliance raiding guilds to find someone with the pattern and who wasn't demanding a huge "tip" for crafting it. With an alt who's an enchanter I respect that crafting professions are expensive to level but I have never demanded a "tip" from anyone. And although I could understand it if it was a rare boe recipe that the crafter may have bought of the AH I can't understand it for a raid drop, when he was just one of 25 people raiding that night and no guild should charge dkp for a pattern that makes a boe item. It all ended well, when a friend recommended a friend. I tipped him happily and he seemed genuinely happy with it. He made another belt for another guildie about half an hour later as well!

Sunday was Kara and a mainly alt group steamed through it with me on Shorty. One of our holy pallys was on his druid alt and it was great to tank with him, for although being undergeared he used to be OT for one of the more progressed guilds on our server with a warrior before the guild died, so we made good, quick progress. Three and a half hours later Shorty had his girdle of the fearless. I changed some of his sets around before logging, but still need to do some work on them: his threat set is now either at 145 hit or 110 (so need to do some fine tuning) and over 9% on the expertise scale. One thing I hadn't really contemplated was that due to the increase in pure defense on the belt my hydross (and other res sets) should be easier to balance.