I can haz bear!

I've been terribly slack about posting lately. I'm afraid that a busy real life (seems like all the birthdays and babies and weddings are all happening at this end of the year) coupled with a sense of ennui has left me feeling a little unmotivated to write, especially when everything is about to change. Yep, the pre-expansion doldrums have finally started to kick in and just like prior to release of The Burning Crusade the question of 'is it really worth doing X or Y' with my toons is starting to rear its' head. There are, however, plenty of things worth doing and with the popular belief that the patch will arrive with the next maintenance the Badgers have been busy.

We've been running ZA for several months now and our once a week extreeeem ZA raid has slowly seen a growing group of people gain their Amani War Bears. As Cynra recently posted we even had an emergency mid week run at a ridiculous time of morning for the Americans and a not so bad but not so early time of night for the Aussies. This Sunday was our last ever run with a chance to get the bear mount if the patch really does hit and yours truly was the only regular raider still without a bear. I'm sure you can imagine how nervous I was! What if we stuffed it up? I wasn't sure what would be worse - if I made a colossal mistake and ruined my own chances or if one of my dear Badgers did and I would be so sad.

I don't think I have suffered such extremes of emotion playing a game since the good old days of blockading in Puzzle Pirates. Firstly one of the people scheduled to come didn't show and we had to find a replacement who would be ok with not rolling on the bear if they didn't have one since this was the final chance for me as a long term regular to get one and was also geared and experienced with the run. Luckily fellow guildie Puppetteer stepped into the breach. The run started really well with everything going super smooth right up until the pulls before the lynx boss. Somehow people got feared and the mobs on each side of the door got pulled and we wiped. We NEVER wipe in ZA any more. I started chewing my fingernails nervously at this point and making strange wheeking noises while Emelin kept chanting at me 'it will be ok, we'll make it' over and over.

So we regrouped, and cleared all the trash and had about 30 seconds to mana up and prepare for the pull. Until that is Puppetteer our dear lock, wandered a little too far into the room and face pulled. Eeeek! Galvanised into action I let rip with a Misdirect to our main tank, everyone sprang into position and the healers out did themselves keeping Mogri (the MT) up while our pally OT Cliff got into cleave sharing position. It was on and everyone unloaded as much firepower as we could muster. Never has a fight seemed to go for so long! We made it with literally seconds to spare and I was the closest I've ever been to a heart attack. The elation after the tension was exhilerating! I got bear! Huzzah!!
To celebrate what is likely the last bear run naturally we had to pose for a photo moment mounted on our bears and then our Moonkin made the excellent suggestion of converging on Ironforge in all our bear-y glory to preen and strut and generally be idiots. This idea met with much acclaim and we hot footed it over there to crack some pony kegs and have a good time doing bear conga lines while people either laughed, cheered or mocked us.
After we'd had our fill of being blithering idiots it was on to Mags. I for one decided that since I'd actually been there and done that I wanted the title to go with it and several Badgers felt the same so Cynra had put in motion the plans for a run. We ended up having to pug it unfortunately which was pretty much full of fail until some people left and we were able to pull in some more guildies who had since logged in. Once we had a higher Badger quotient things went much more smoothly and I'm now the happy owner of at least one BC title. Sadly no Hand of Adal as we were unable to down Kael on our Saturday raid, but still, it's been one awesome weekend for Jez!

Special edit: our irascible rogue recorded our jaunt in IF and has added a very fitting soundtrack, it made me giggle like a loon all over again watching it.