I play on Stormrage-US PvE, one of the original servers at launch.  My rogue’s birthday is 1 hour after the original WoW launched.  It is a server with a 90%+ Alliance ratio.  It is an old-tech server which, to my knowledge, has been upgraded twice “officially” but I’m sure maintenance has occurred over the years.  It is, through subjective analysis of the GFORUMS, one of the least stable servers currently on offer.  It also runs login queues, in 2014.  It has not merged and has been offered multiple free-transfers and is still full of people.  The problem is that people have 8+ characters and have been on the server so long, they know everyone.  My expectation is that on WoD launch, the server takes a massive crash for a few days and queues exist every day for the first month.  The smart move here should be like FF11, where creating a new character requires you to accept an invite from an existing player first.  Ah well…

Tuesdays are patch days and also raid reset days.  Which means I can take yet another stab at Raiding With Leashes.  I headed into MC to try Magmadar (the fire dog) and was lucky enough to get the drop.  I checked my achievement list to see what I was missing (rather than look at the pet list) and lo and behold, Raiding With Leashes II was there.  Moar Pets says I!

I’ve already tried a few stabs at the Ashes of Al’ar and Attumen Mount in TK and Kara respectively.  I did not realize until last night that I could run even more of those raids for stuff.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the transmog gear and there are certainly some neat items but mounts/pets really get my OCD going.

So I logged on to my fresh 90 boosted Druid and gave ‘er a go.  I hadn’t done Kara in a LONG time so I needed to reorient a bit.  There are 3 mandatory bosses, Moroes, Opera and the chess event.  I need Attumen for the mount, Illhoof, the Wolf, the Curator and the Prince for the pets.  The Druid run was rather long, somewhere around 30 minutes, but with no real challenge outside of the stupid chess event that I’ve never liked and should be removed from the game and never spoken of again in proper social circles. *catches breath*  Was lucky and got the Wolf drop but that’s it.  I got the MC drop from Magmadar and still have no luck with Razorgore in BWL.  Naxx Loatheb is the last pet needed there and AQ40 just won’t drop anything.

RWL2 though, that sent me to the BC raids of Tempest Keep and Serpentshrine Caverns.  I did these back in the day and found them terribly difficult.  TK is easy at 90, with the exception of Sunstrider’s perma-stun goons.  I was lucky to lay down a could bleed-effects though, so they died while I was picking my nose.  Here I needed to kill all 4 bosses, only got 1 pet drop though.  It was quick and the entrance to the raid was stacked with people, so I guess everyone is trying to farm something.

My memories of SSC did not map to the zone.  Where before the map was just littered with enemies and death, now it was just a walk in the park.  4 bosses with pets, including Vashj.  The first 3 were easy.  Vashj is, from my understanding, broken.  She does no appreciable damage outside of her electricity DoT which ticks for about 10% of my HP.  She is the only raid boss who has killed me.  Most boss battles have no real mechanics to worry about at 90, just hit them.  Twin Emperors in AQ have one immune to magic, the other to melee, so each character needs to pick the right one.  Vashj becomes immune unless you find 4 Tainted Cores from unique enemies that spawn every 20s or so.  And there are these strider buggers that stun you.  So what happened was that I hit the 4th core, she hit me with 2 DoTs and I got stunned at the same time and died.  Twice.  My last run had her clear out of town.

Total clear time for all of this was around 2 hours – MC, BWL, Kara, Naxx, TK and SSC.

I figured I had time left before bed to try out the run on my Monk.  He skipped MC as I had the pet but he did all the other ones.  Total run time was under 45 minutes, where a solid 20 was flight travel time.  Faster clear.  Only 1 drop out of 15 possible.

Oh well.  Next run is the Shammy and Rogue.  Maybe I’ll get a bit luckier!