Second Heroic: The Mechanar

It's going to end soon, right? My luck has to come crashing down on me like some giant Elekk taking a dump on my head and squaring karma with the world (of Warcraft). Doesn't it? :)

I've always said that if it wasn't for bad luck, my characters would have none at all. I've been playing WoW since beta and my account goes back to "Day 1". Drops usually eluded me, if not forever, for a long time. Every hunter in my guild or raid would get bows and guns before me. It wasn't exactly a running joke among my guild, but people noticed. The only exception to this rule I can think of was lucking out on a Beastmaster piece on our first successful completion of UBRS "back in the day".

Anyway... so it's a rainy Saturday in my area. No real plans. Family is busy, so I clear a mid-afternoon Mechanar run with my wife and off we go. I haven't done this instance in a while and it's only my second ever heroic. It goes great. No serious problems. We had one wipe (Feign, FTW) and one more close call, but got the two mini-bosses down and the 1st boss and collected 3 badges. We vote to continue on, skipping the 2nd "boss" and going to the last one. He's got two things that I want. The [Abacus of Violent Odds] and the [Beast Lord Helm]. The helm is probably a sidegrade but gives me an option if something else drops in Karazhan to replace either my chest or legs. The Abacus is on my want list. I didn't even check the heroic drops.

We fight our way down the hallway, and use some hit and run tactics (and the elevator) to make things a little simpler, and get to the final pull. Goes fine, and the boss comes running at us. That goes great, too. We've got a great group. My guild's MT, main Holy Paly, Shadow Priest and a PUG Mage. We loot the final boss and this item to the right pops up. I didn't see the helm or the Abacus, so I was a little disappointed... at first.

I didn't even notice the gloves. Then everyone was saying "grats". Huh? "The gloves, Annai." Oh. "The gloves?" "Yeah... you don't want 'em?" Hmm.... ::blush:: "Yeah... I guess I do. Thanks!"

Often when you loot stuff -- at least for me -- with something like RatingBuster, there's a decision to be made. "Yeah... it has more +Agil, but I lose X and Y." This was a no-brainer. I've been getting along fine with some decent quest reward gloves, but these new ones are better *in every category*. Doesn't happen that often, so it's a happy day. (Yeah... it's a dumb screenshot, since I didn't compare it to my existing gloves. Trust me... it's better.)

I'm running Recount in the background for this run, not really paying attention. I didn't gear-check the mage. The rest of the run is from our normal Kara group, so people are geared OK. I was pretty pleased. I had to do a bit of trapping, but still managed to keep the hunter gods happy by bringing -- as BRK puts it -- massive quantities of sustained DPS. I have more detail and a couple of more detailed screenshots, but I think I'll save them for another post. Gonna try more math.

(NOTE: Forgive the names on the images. For some reason, I thought I was in Botanica. :D)