New Moon stepped back into Karazhan last night once again. This time, we were starting with The Curator and working our way past that as time allowed. We cleared the trash up to Curator pretty easily, though we did have a few deaths along the way. I think the Curator was a sign of things to come. We just didn’t have our stuff together. It took us three tries to finally down him; and the entire time our Raid Leader, Grimix, kept telling people that we needed to DPS the flares faster. We should have that fight down by now. I guess he’s not on farm status just yet.

He dropped Gloves of the Fallen Champion which no one else really needed but me, so now I have the Justicar Handguards. I think I have more gloves then Amelda Marcos had shoes.

We continued to be sloppy on the Library trash (me included), which was frustrating at first. But after a few “encouraging” words from Arzen (Protection Warrior) we tightened up a bit. We cleared just enough trash to get us to Aran so we could have some additional tries at him.

Aran is a DPS fight with controlled execution mixed in, so everyone was either DPS’ing or healing. I was trying to do a little bit of both. It was clear that we had a good DPS crowd last night, because we were taking his health down pretty quickly in comparison to other nights. Our problem was that some of our cloth-wearing members kept getting killed early on in the fight. On the first two attempts, we would lose either our Priests or Warlock before we would even reach the pyroblast or the elementals. That was just not going to work if we hoped to get to the end.

We faired a bit better on the 3rd attempt. We did a great job of keeping Aran’s health bar even with or lower than his mana bar. That ensured that we could deal with the elementals and not worry about the polymorph happening at the same time. And sure enough, the elementals spawned with a good chunk of mana left on Aran. Off we went to control the elementals. One was banished, one was perma-feared, one was tanked by me, and the other was downed by most everyone else. Somewhere during the elemental fight, we started losing people. First Arzen went, and then the polymorph hit with the elementals still up. Good thing the last 2 were banished/feared. That helped quite a bit. After the Pyroblast, the elementals despawned 5 seconds later.

I don’t know how people dropped, but we lost Zophia, then Savita, then Grimix and Alin. After that, Ktarye and Zinshara dropped. That left me (Tank?), Cadeus (Rogue) and Kyllyn (Priest). With Aran down to 1% health, the next thing I hear is “Heal yourselves! You have no healers!” We had lost Kyllyn, and then Cadeus dropped right after. I was alone. Me and Aran, a duel to the death. But whose death?

Sorry, I felt like being dramatic. Luckily, Kyllyn kept sending some heals my way in spirit form, and Cadeus had poisoned Aran before he died. That really helped. I hit Aran with everything I had. Consecrate. Exorcism. Hammer of Wrath. Judgment of Righteousness. I even bubbled right before a Flame Wreath and used Lay on Hands on myself.

That last 1% seemed like an eternity. He had about 8,500 health left and I was at full health with about 16,000. You’d think I had the upper hand there, but I was doing around 200 damage per attack while he was doing 1200. The outcome you ask?

Shade of Aran

And then there was one … me.

Aran down!! Congratulations New Moon!! Nicely done!

We did Chess for some relaxing fun after that fight. That netted me the Triptych Shield of the Ancients for my healing set, and after that we called it a night. Monday will be uncharted territory for New Moon. Prince, watch out!!