I went to 10man Ulduar with Twelve tonight. We were just clearing up to the keepers for the leet hardmode group to finish off tomorrow. All good with me, I don't mind getting saved.. haven't even done 10man for weeks.

As soon as I accepted the invite I went to adjust my UI for raid & realised I hadn't tested it with a vehicle yet. o_o I've had problems with vehicle bars not showing up in the past. So I ran to Icecrown and jumped on one of the harpoon guns. Badness. No harpoon abilities on my bars. However the abilities worked when I pressed number keys.

So I flew over to Ulduar, thinking "oh god please put me on something easy". I'd driven all the vehicles, and had been a demolisher gunner in the past. So I know what abilities are there, it was just a matter of remembering which went to which key.. mostly I was just hoping I wouldn't have to do anything complicated like loading myself up to be shot to the boss or anything (which I've only done once before). Luckily I was given the very easy job of siege gunner, which is the only one I hadn't done before. It was easy enough to figure out where my abilities were with some experimentation.

We got Leviathan down after a couple of wipes (left some towers up). Then continued to Razorscale. It was here that I decided that I fucken hate Grid. I don't know if it was just the way I had it set up, but not being able to see my bubbles/renews/PoMs etc on peoples' bars was incredibly annoying, also those tiny little boxes? No thankyou. I switched back to HealBot after the fight.

Overall I was pretty disappointed with my heals. I just didn't get into that smooth healing zone, I was a bit all over the place and my cooldowns felt slightly off or something. Could either be the new UI, the brand new computer I'm using that I haven't raided on before, the fact that I haven't raided in a while, the fact that I was raiding with Twelve, or the cold I have that is making me feel like my head's stuffed with cotton wool - I don't know. :P In any case I need to stop watching heal metres when I'm disc. Or get that recount addon that shows disc contributions.

It was interesting, seeing the little differences between Twelve's strats and TF's strats. Some of the strategies we used were in order to go for achievements (of which I got a few :D). Kiting Kologarn's eyebeams was.. an experience (never did that with TF). lol :P Overall it was a pretty fun raid. :) Now I must go tweak my UI some more (i.e. get rid of Grid & replace it with Pitbull raidframes).

The last two nights, I've been on Ulduar sitout. Earning dkp & still able to grind rep for my crazy Insane achievement? Awesome. I can't grind Steamwheedle rep, because I can't reset Dire Maul due to being in the Ulduar raid group. But I've been farming heaps of Ravenholdt rep - got 6000 rep through to Honored last night, and 3000 more rep today. I've got my rep route through Stromgarde Keep, I know where every mob spawns, it's just a matter of putting myself on autorun & chucking SW:P on everything I see. Although I only get 5 rep per mob, the mobs are only around level 35, so they go down in a couple of seconds. I get interrupted sometimes. Lowbies are questing in the area & get pissed off when I run past & take down all their mobs. Today a rogue & a lock, both around level 35, tried taking me down - the lock feared me, and the rogue stunlocked me. I got pissed off at the interruption and raped their fases, then camped them for about 15min. :P

Tonight I actually got called into Ulduar for Mimiron. Earlier today I'd revamped my UI completely, I went from this to this. Very different, and making much use of invisible bars. I also finally decided to switch from HealBot to Grid + Clique. But because I haven't ever used Grid + Clique before, I was way too nervous to use it when I was called in.. so I used HealBot. When I switched UIs, I had to redo all my HealBot binds, and I think I mistyped Prayer of Healing, because when I tried to use it, it didn't work. Also, my bind for Pain Suppression didn't work. The result: I stood there spamming my PS bind when I was supposed to use it, saw nothing was happening, targeted the tank in a panic and manually cast it from one of my (invisible) bars (thank god I actually put it on there). And my heals were atrocious. I am not used to being so bad on that fight. I've always been holy for Mimiron in the past, because awesome raid heals are needed for phase 2, so doing it as disc was.. different. I did survive the entire fight, but that wasn't difficult - I was there for all of TF's progression encounters and a billion times after that, so I know the fight pretty damn well. Just.. heals were bad. When I realised my Prayer of Healing wasn't working I was kinda like "ugh" and just tried shield spamming and casting lots of PoMs and Renews. My Divine Hymn got interrupted dammit. :P

Anyways. I'd been waiting to get a chance to show Twelve that I'm not the nub I was when I was last in the guild. Hopefully the fact that I didn't die on Mimi indicated something of that at least. I was so nervous though, lol. :P And, I didn't really know who my heal target was, I mean there were two holy pallies there I think so I guess I was raid heals. Raid healing as disc: a great way to show the guild my potential lolol. Should have gone holy, but it all happened so fast after I was summoned in. I was slightly disappointed that I didn't get to go on with them to Thorim, because I think I shine as disc on that fight - shield spam ftw in the arena. :D But really I'm just happy that they let me come in for something. ^_^

Note to self for next time I'm called in: Make your damn raid stuffs bar visible without mousing over. Said bar has my Divine Hymn macro, pots, shadowfiend, Desperate Prayer & other useful things.

Current progress on Insane:
Bloodsail Buccaneers: Honored (done)
Steamwheedle Cartel
Booty Bay: 9550/36000 Hated
Gadgetzan: 9425/36000 Hated (this is less than the others cos I stupidly killed some guards in Gadget when I stupidly tried to use the flight path)
Ratchet: 9550/36000 Hated
Winterspring: 9550/36000 Hated
Shen'drelar: 2500/3000 Neutral
Ravenholdt: 3040/12000 Honored
Darkmoon Faire: 75/3000 Neutral

So Sanguinary.. isn't really working out. Raids starting at 9pm are definitely good, but ending at 1am.. not so much. I think 8-830 is still my ideal raid start time, with 12 the ideal finish time (or earlier! :D). My daughter has just started school, so I have to get up early Mondays, Tuesdays & Wednesdays, which means late night raiding on Sunday/Monday is no good for me anymore. Sanguinary has only been doing Ulduar on Wednesday & Thursday nights, and 25man Naxx on Monday nights, purpose being to gear up people for Ulduar. They are very pushy about people only bringing mains to the Naxx runs so that they can smash through it fast, which didn't end up happening the one time I went (I declined the invite to the one this week, using the excuse of computer issues, which is partly true). I really don't want to be obliged to go to Naxx anyway, I've done it so many times that I hate the place (apart from Heigan, which is always fun :P) and I'm not gonna get any upgrades from there.

Also.. the Ulduar raids with Sanguinary are painful. Horribly painful. I joined the guild thinking that I would be the only disc priest & was looking forward to a refreshing absence of holy pallies. So I was slightly horrified when I turned up for my second raid with them and saw three holy pallies and another disc priest in the raid group. Do these people not understand that holy pallies & disc priests are tank healers & ideally you should only have two of them? I suggested I go holy for the raid, and was told to stay disc. Cue much eyerolling. We proceeded to wipe on XT several times, and I just respecced anyway. Nobody actually noticed until later when somebody posted the heal metre, and the raid leader (or someone, in this particular raid there was nobody really "leading") said "oh, you're holy". >.> I rock that heal metre as holy. xD

I was impressed when we managed to down Auriaya, using a very bad and drawn out strat (only just beat the timer). Auriaya is as far as the guild has gotten through Ulduar. We made several attempts on Thorim, which failed miserably. I asked the other disc priest to help me shield spam in the arena, they ignored me. I tried to give suggestions on what we could do to improve our strategy (for starters, more healers in the tunnel than out in the arena is a terribad idea), I was ignored. This pissed me off. I don't mind being in progression runs, in fact I really enjoy them, but not when I can see that we're doing stuff obviously wrong & when I point it out I'm flatout ignored, and we continue to wipe over & over with the same bad strat.

I had PC issues last week (overheating & switching off in the middle of boss encounters), and hence couldn't raid, which was refreshing. I played around with my alts & had much more fun than I would have had in Raid of Badness. I think I decided then that I want to go a bit more casual for a while. I'd still really like to raid occasionally (I'd love to see a Yogg kill & try some hardmodes) but not so scheduled, and preferably not with bads.

Meanwhile, I'm having so much fun with my alts. Dollfase the mage is currently level 71 and questing in Borean Tundra. She's cute, she looks like a little bee on her yellow & black striped mechanostrider. xD Mages are a pretty powerful class I've found, but a bit boring to level. All I do really is spam frostbolt. :P

Zkay the DK (named after my DK friend from Cabal, Tkay) surprised me by being extremely fun to play. I adore playing her cos she smashes through everything so fast! :D And for once I don't have to run & hide from horde, lol. :P I'm still bad at PvP but at least I have a fighting chance now. ^^; The playstyle is so different from other classes I've played (casters), which makes her more fun & interesting. I kinda wanna tank on her. :D At the moment she's level 70 & in Howling Fjord.

I'm levelling mining & jewelcrafting (both around 350-375 currently) on Zkay. While levelling mining in Nagrand I noticed I was getting a lot of Kurenai rep killing ogres in the caves, and after I finished levelling mining in the area I decided to continue on for a bit & get to exalted. I got Zkay her tan talbuk today. xD On Dollfase I'm doing herbing & alchemy (I've got her herbing up but haven't invested much time in alchemy yet). I spent a huge amount of money levelling Zkay's jc. >.> But hopefully I will eventually turn it into a profitable profession. I made a lot of money levelling inscription on Panacea recently, farming all the mats myself. I'm still saving for Panacea's epic flyer so she can farm herbs faster.. but after the amount I spent on Zkay's jc it's gonna take a while I think. :(

p.s. in other news, I broke up with Damager. We're still friends. :) He's going to take a break from the game I think.. boo. :(