Five Days. That is the amount of time I have until the mover arrives to cart all of my worldly belongings from point A to point B – leaving me to desperately stare at the boxes he leaves in his wake and hope beyond all hope that they will somehow magically unpack themselves.  Why am I telling you this? Because I want to explain why I will be somewhat sparse over the next week or so!

The craziness starts tomorrow.

Much to Brade’s chagrin, I have decided that the plain cream walls of the new apartment are insufficient for my needs, and I am going to be adding a few accent walls.  Which means painting.  Which is great – because it’s the kind of DIY (do it yourself) project that Brade’s parents love, and we get to couple some expert help with visiting with his parents.  It’s pretty much win/win.  I’m going to be adding a deep red wall to our living area and a gold wall to our spare room – and perhaps to our bedroom (shhhhh, don’t tell Brade about that third wall – he can’t do anything but groan once the paint is up!).

While the ladies are playing with paint, the gents have their own tasks…invovling power tools (hah hah hah – that is my Tim Allen grunt, by the way).  They are going to be bringing the television over and mounting it above the fireplace, as well as connecting all of the appropriate cords for our peripherals.  I have even purchased a lovely cord hider thingy from The Container Store so that the cords aren’t a huge mess all over our walls!

Once they’ve finished that project, they will be jaunting over to Home Depot to pick up our new Grill.  I enjoy grilling – and hopefully this one is small enough to satisfy Brade (Mr. “why do we need a grill that big”), and large enough that I can easily cook on it.  This, my friends, is supposedly how that whole “compromise” thing works.

You see, I absolutely love to grill.  And you know what we will be having for dinner while we unpack on Sunday?  Probably McDonald’s.  But Monday or Tuesday, I’m going to light that sucker up and make some steak, potatoes and corn on the cob.  It will be delicious.  Trust me on that one.  This particular meal is one of my specialties

(I’m still trying to convince Brade that I need that cute little 3 piece patio set I saw at Home Depot while I was looking at grills.  I mean, a girl’s gotta have someone to rest her feet with a glass of lemonade while slaving away on dinner, right? RIGHT?!?!).

In addition Wednesday’s activities, we’ve still got to finish packing and get our mail changed (I swear, I meant to do this already).  I did, however, take my own advice and schedule our internet set up to occur before the move – which means that Saturday post 4 pm is going to be a night out for dinner and movies (assuming we’ve finished packing…).

Between tonight at 4:00 pm when I pick up the keys (ok…more like 9:00 pm after we finish our raid) and Sunday at 9:00 am when the mover arrives, we will no doubt be ferrying anything we’d prefer to move ourselves to the new apartment (Computers, China, USRD (useless shit requiring dusting – aka knick knacks).  Oh and buying more bubble wrap – you can never have too much bubble wrap.  Seriously.

So if you see less of me than you might expect this week, that is why!

In other, non-moving type (and more WoW related) news, Brade and I secured tickets to Blizzcon again this year and will be in attendance.  I’m looking forward to it, and I’m sure that I will blather on more about it as it gets closer to the date – and I’m not in the process of moving!

Last night I had my first date with Heroic Nef – and much to my disappointment, after 3 hours he rarely let me get past first base and made me buy dinner!  Of course, after that date I am riddled with questions on what I (we) did wrong!  Because I have so many questions that I’m trying to work through, and we barely had the chance to tickle phase 2 last night, this musings post is largely going to be a brain dump of my thoughts and questions.  I’d love any feedback or insights that you may have and/or want to offer!

Questions

1. One Crackle or Two in Phase 1?  I’ve watched videos ad nauseam and the truth is – you see both pretty equally.  Last night we had some pulls we pushed successfully with two crackles, but it was always very close.  Conversely we had some pulls where Ony exploded.  Something to consider is that we run 3 tanks (although our feral does some pretty beefy damage if he gets MC’d after he’s rounded up all the adds) and 7 healers (with our healing make up, I do not feel it’s reasonable for us to do it with 6 healers – and I believe our DPS is strong enough to support 7).
2. Related to question 1 – if we take only one crackle will that negatively affect us in phase 3?  I’m really concerned about pushing 81-83% of Nef’s health in phase 3.  More specifically, I’m worried about keeping our kiter standing for that much of Nef’s health.  Maybe I’m just being a nervous nelly about it – as DPS will only continue to increase as everyone grows more comfortable with managing the MC mechanic.
3. Nef DPS vs. Ony DPS?  How much do you allocate to each?  I’m not entirely sure that we had it “right” last night – which means I’m not entirely sure that we can make an adequate assessment of our ability to push two crackles.  I feel that we are missing something fundamental in when, how, and how much DPS to allocate to both Ony and Nef to facilitate the crackles.  On our most successful two crackle pulls I moved 3 people to Nef as soon as he landed (2 hunters and a warrior), kept everyone else on Ony until she reached 50%, then had 6 DPS stay on Ony and everyone else switch to Nef.
4. WTF is with Ony’s Threat?  Seriously.  I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this, or if it’s something that we are doing that makes her go all weird – but we’ve had the following happen with any number of tanks that have tanked Ony:  Tank jumps down, pulls Ony and starts to move her to position.  Hunters/Rogues MD Ony into tank.  Omen clearly shows that tank has threat on Ony.  Ony doesn’t care that the tank has threat and bounces around as if threat is on several people.  In fact, one time last night I had Ony threat – and she thought I was very tasty indeed.  At the point I had threat, I’d done almost no healing outside of a LB stack and a rejuv on the tank.  Do other people have this problem?  Is it an issue with how she reads threat?  Is it an issue with how she reads MD threat?  WTF is going on with it?
5. Are you spamming “2″ fast enough?  I think we had some people far more successful with managing the MC buff than others.  Those that were most successful mapped “2″ to their mousewheel down and just spammed that in addition to mashing their “2″ button.  As we spent more time in phase 1, I definitely think people got better at handling this, which means their DPS increased, but I think some people still struggled.  I have absolutely zero insight on this, as I break my MC as soon as it comes up.  Anyone have tips on how to “mash 2 harder”?  (And yes, we had traps/earthbind totems for everyone).
6. To trinket or not to trinket?  We’ve not made a definitive decision on this yet, but we have asked everyone to get their ass out to Tol’Barad and start working the dailys for tokens until we do decide.  Last night, I’m not sure that we lost anyone to a crackle.  We had a barrier and a raid wall to mitigate the damage – and even if we missed our barrier as long as people were topped up they survived.  While I think that it would help mitigate damage, I’m not entirely sold on it being “necessary”.  Things to consider:  We will likely always have two disc priests and a raid wall – at worst we will have two of the three.
7. Phase 2 healing?  Even though we didn’t get a lot of phase 2 time last night, and the times we did get there we either blew people up or missed interrupts, the times we did get there had me question how to heal the phase.  I’m wondering if it would be best to have a healer that focuses on the cinder people, and another that focuses on the non-cinder folks – cross healing as necessary.  Does it need to be that dictated?  Am I over complicating it?

Even though our date last night was a little lackluster, Nef did kindly ask me out again tonight.  I’m hoping to spend more time in phase 2 tonight, which will, I’m sure, only create more questions!  But to get there, I think I need to answer the first set of questions with regards to phase 1.  I’m completely open to (and welcome!) any feedback and/or experiences that anyone may want to share