This curator is equipped for gallery protection... SHUT UP!

Grrr... stupid Curator. We're a casual guild and don't have several hours each night we schedule raids (currently Sunday and Monday) to beat our head against a single boss over and over again. We try to limit runs to 2 hours -- sometimes a bit more.

This past weekend, we had a great run into Karazhan.

On Saturday, we decided to attempt to make a beeline for the Curator, so we hit Moroes first. One shot. Woot! We head for Opera next. Now... my guild has taken down Opera once without me, so it's not exactly a guild first, but damned if we didn't one-shot Romulo and Julianne, too. (It's our second week in a row getting this event.) It's the first time I had seen them die. I had my fingers crossed for the Beastmaw Pauldrons, but they didn't drop. Instead, Romulo's Poison Vial did. There was some chatter on TeamSpeak about this being a great DPS trinket. My +Hit was already pretty good, but I figured I'd roll on it. The only other melee/ranged DPS class in the group was the rogue, and he had already gotten the dagger from Moroes. Didn't do the casters any good. I didn't figure the tanks would want a trinket like that, so...

/roll 100
Annai rolls a 100

LOL! I am -- without a doubt -- the worst roller in WoW. Every time something comes up that I *really* want, I typically roll in the single digits. PUGs along for the ride with 8-9+ of *my* guild members have gotten both the crossbow and wrists from Attumen ahead of me in Kara. Random numbers hate me. Anyway... I wasn't even sure I *wanted* the item, but felt I should roll anyway. OF COURSE I BLOW A 100 ROLL ON THAT! I felt bad because even if someone else *did* want to roll, it's kind of useless to roll against that.

After reading up on the item, I'm not sure it's that great -- reviews are mixed -- but it did give me a 2+% DPS boost on the last Maiden fight (more later). At least that's what Recount said. So... I'll probably continue to use it until something better drops.

So... wonder of wonders. Both lead-ins to The Curator are down and it's only an hour into the run. We ran through the now open stage door, heading through the remainder of the Opera Hall area and on to the Broken Stair area. Got to the pre-Curator pulls and did mostly fine with them. And... there he was....

...and we wiped. Spectacularly. Didn't even see the first Evocation on the first attempt. The flares were murdering us. We tried twice, I think, and were stuck with some re-spawns and some guild members who needed to log.

No problem... we've got another *whole night* to try him out. The next night, we cleared the first trash mobs up to him and gave it three more tries. We got slightly better each time, but on each attempt, we had lost at least one raid member before the first Evocation and we weren't keeping up with the flares so not getting in damage during the Evocations. A few different strats were tried, but my thinking is that we didn't have enough class diversity. No warlock. No druid. No shaman. We were missing some buffs and potential tools there.

So as not to make the evening end on a bad note, we decided to back-track to Attumen and maybe Maiden. Attumen went down like a ton of bricks and dropped a couple of upgrades. The good thing for us is that people still need some things from him, so it's not just a rep kill. We lost the other hunter, but decided to press on to Maiden. I've only seen her go down once, and would you believe we actually one-shotted her, too, with 9 people. Pretty scary for our little band of casual misfits. :)

Maiden eats the floor...

This is a bit belated, but my guild managed to finally take out the Maiden the other night. We've been close several times, but always seemed to have bad luck in one way or another and never quite finished her off. This week, after having one wipe on Attumen -- who is otherwise on "farm status" -- we blew through both Moroes and Maiden with one-shots.



We had two PUG members from allied guilds. They've run with us a time or two before and one is a former guild member. Not sure what the difference was in this fight, and our group make-up was actually a little strange for Karazhan, I though. Two hunters, two paladins (?), two mages, two priests, a tank, and a rogue. None of us are geared all that well, since we've only ever downed Moroes a couple of times and "farmed" Attumen half a dozen or more.

The fight was smooth as can be. I think we lost two people -- one midway through the fight to a Holy Fire and our guild priest very near the end. I still don't have a handle on the difference in that fight. Having two paladins with Blessing of Sacrifice probably helped, and one of the paladins is Holy to help with the healing. Having two priests able to dispell Holy Fires helped, too.

Whatever. She's dead; we're not.

As a follow-up, we went in and gave the Opera event a try the next night. Unfortunately, we got Romulo and Julianne as our event, which is supposedly the hardest of the bunch. Our first fight was actually our best, and after our third attempt, I was disco-d and could not get back in because of the authentication servers being down. Another member was lost and although the group was able to replace us, they were not able to complete the event. I think our mechanics were good and our class mix (different from the above) was fine, we just didn't execute all that well. We'll get 'em next time. :)

Moroes! Dead!

Yeah... maybe that image is a little too small to see any detail, but it was the best of the bunch that I snapped after my guild's downing of Moroes this past Monday.

We've taken to running Karazhan on Sundays and Mondays now. Our guild is fairly small -- but growing -- and we consider ourselves pretty casual. Mostly older folks, several married and with kids, so we can't raid 7 nights a week for hours on end. The second Kara night was just added and we have guild nights on Thursdays as well.

Anyway, we had actually tried Moroes a couple of times on Sunday, but I wasn't around for the attempts and was not sure what happened. The RL decided to tackle him again on Monday night, after they had downed Attumen the night previous. (We continue to "farm" Attumen and gear a few people up.)

On this night, the WoW "gods" were with us, I guess. We had two poor attempts, one ending before it began. I had been on a couple of failed Moroes attempts with other guilds, but never actually seen him drop. We had the requisite dual priests and me as the hunter. On the final attempt, they decided to use me for an emergency trap should shackles break. After the pull, I sic'd my pet on the first-kill target and dropped a trap at the priests' feet, and went back to DPS'ing the first add. Kept the pet up and on Growl with Mend Pet and she went down pretty quickly. Our Pally had been off-tanking the second-kill target and we quickly got her down as well and switched DPS to Moroes. Our priests and other healers were doing an awesome job of keeping those with Garotte alive. I'm not sure how many times Moroes vanished, but I think we got lucky and he put the Garotte on the same person a couple of times -- thank goodness it doesn't stack. It was a close thing in the end, with a couple of people dropping as Moroes dropped under 10% health, but we managed to keep enough DPS alive and took him out. I survived an agro-pull (got nervous and forgot Feign Death was cooled down), by the skin of my teeth.

Our Maiden attempt was less fruitful, and we seem to be a bit stuck on her, but also never seem to have enough time in our allotted runs -- we try to keep them to about two hours -- to make several tries. This week we only managed two attempts and had her under 35% when bad luck struck. Our Paladin's Blessing of Sacrifice was put on a rogue, who then died, so the Pally didn't get snapped out of Repentance and the tank went down *just* as our other healers came out. Bad luck, that, but we'll get her soon. We're so close we can taste it.