Ring of Blood and Gorefiend

As I've mentioned, the raid on Thursday was cancelled with a lot of notice. So because we had a fair amount of raiders hanging around, we hit the Ring Of Blood quests. This was mainly for gold; each quest paid almost 11 gold, but I also had my eye on the Mag'hari Fury Brand to add to my Enhancement set.

Total chaos is all I can say; total and utter chaos. There were 2 other groups at the ring trying to do their quests. I was in a group with a Bear tank, hunter, dps warrior and ret paladin. If you've not done this quest line, it's a lot of fun. You rock up to Gurgthock the goblin, who stands next to the ring, and accept a quest to fight a certain boss; this triggers the boss to appear in the ring and off you go. Once you kill the boss, you hand in to the troll standing next to the goblin, then you're ready to talk to Gurgthock again to fight the next boss. If someone else is fighting the boss you can't talk to Gurgthock. Once you can talk to him... its a bun fight to be the first so you get a crack at a boss.

So each tank from 3 groups would try to talk to Gurgthock first to get their boss in the ring; when the boss appeared he'd find himself being attacked by all 3 groups, and we'd have random by standing Ogres to deal with too. When I was too slow with handing in the quest, a member of my party would start the next boss before I was on that part, so I didn't get credit and we'd have to do it all again. Total chaos. The hunter would also periodically pull aggro and then have to feign death; sometimes he would get away with it and sometimes he would get hit and would need a heal. Hunters - if you have a threat meter, feign death before you pull aggro!

Eventually we prevailed and the offhand was mine. Looking to cause more trouble in Outlands, we hopped on over to Shadowmoon Valley to help out an Ancient Shadowmoon Spirit divine the location of one Teron Gorefiend. The mission: recover Gorefiend's armour. The method: kill Vhel'kur. The madness: Rather than wear my Spectrecles, I kept my healing helm on instead so I couldn't see the dragon attacking anyone. Luckily I could still heal and even more luckily once we'd finished him off I could equip the Spectrecles and then loot the corpse. Unfortunately because I couldn't see Vhel'kur's health, I popped Bloodlust just as he died. Oops. I learnt in this fight that Earth Shielding a mad mage who is bound to pull aggro is a very good idea indeed. Once I'd handed in the quest and made a colossal mistake (damn you Gorefiend!), I was left with some helm choices. I'll probably take the Shamanistic Helmet of Second Sight because I've somehow signed up to Karazhan as DPS so I'll be needing some socketed items to put spell hit gems in. The Spectracles quest line is a really fun one, full of some cool lore. It's just a pity I won't be able to kill Gorefiend, but Chief Apothecary Hildagard did say "Should you ever find Teron Gorefiend". Gorefiend's exact wareabouts are unknown to me, I suspect he is in the Black Temple but I'm not going to verify that any time soon.

I am finding that having the ability to heal groups for 5 mans and quests is very useful; we can put together a group if a tank is around because there are usually a lot of DPSers online, and therefore I can get all those annoying group quests done without too much trouble.