Welcome everyone to my first foray into embedded reporting! As I mentioned in the Pre-Blog, I’ll be reporting live from Blackwing Lair in World of Warcraft. I’ll also be answering any questions you have along the way, so feel free to post comments if I mention anything that’s confusing. I’ll do my best to explain this in terms that anyone can understand, but it’s a little hard to remember what doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Thanks to the very cool Mark Chang, I have a monster of a computer in the Advanced Computing Lab here to play on tonight. Dual-core 3.4Ghz Xeons, 2GB of Ram, an nVidia Quadro FX 3450 and a 23 inch widescreen LCD. It’s almost too much to handle. But all the settings maxed out at 1920×1200 at 53 frames per second is pretty damn cool. For those of you who didn’t follow all that, I’ll summarize: I’m playing on a very fast, very pretty computer.

We’re using Ventrilo as our VoIP software. It lets us communicate much faster than just typing.

We’ve got about an hour before we start going, so tune in soon for updates and screenshots.

• (6:39) - We’re starting early! Hooray. BWL is inside of scenic Blackrock Mountain. See below.

  Here’s a screenshot with my UI enabled. I’ll save you all from having to look at it and disable it for screenshots.
  

• (6:45) - We pulled. I’m controlling Razorgore. Which means I get to run around as a big dragon. Rawr!
  
  He’s my “minion”, if you know what I mean.
• (6:51) - The rogues killed all the mages so now they’re just sitting in a corner. Kayden went and made a ham and swiss sandwich. He says it is quite delicious.
• (6:55) -Razorgore is dead, we’re handing out loot. Becuase I had control of him when he got free he came straight for me. I bravely sacrificed myself to take a rogue out of combat so I wouldn’t have to pay for repairs. Razorgore drops the bracers. There are 8 slots for armor, 6 of the class set pieces drop in BWL. The other 2 are off of the last bosses of Molten Core (legs) and Onyxia (head).
• (7:03) - We’re setting up for Vael, widely considered the hardest boss in the instance to get down. He’s been the source of more than one guild breaking up in sheer frustration. He’s big, red and fiery. This fight is extreme and mistiming on the part of healers or tanks can easily wipe you.
  

• (7:07) - First wipe of the night. The lag is horrific tonight for some reason. We’re the only Alliance guild in the instance and yet still we’re getting 2 second lag spikes. The Vael fight is really frantic and the lag makes it almost impossible to get down the split second timing necessary to kill him. We’re hoping it clears up a little so we can actually kill him.
• (7:15) - Second wipe. Sigh. Vael seems really buggy about his aggro, he’s not reliably attacking the tanks. Here’s a shot of us rezzing everyone back up. I blame Kayden and his delicious sandwich. Vael obviously does not approve of ham combined with swiss.
  
• (7:27) - Wipe Three! On the plus side the lag finally started letting up about halfway through the attempt. It went from “completely unplayable” to “oh, I think we might actually be able to do this”. Fourth times the charm, right?
  
  Wooo, I’m a ghost.
• (7:33) - We’re swapping some people in and out to help provide a buffer against Blizzard’s crappy servers. A lot of the people I raid with have alternate characters that have good enough gear to do BWL. So when we need more of a certain class, we ask people to swap in. We swapped a hunter for a warrior which will hopefully make all the difference. Lag seems to be clearing up as well.

  
  His crown is fiery! I don’t know what those gnomes in the bottom corner are doing…

• (7:45) - Vael down! We very nearly wiped at 1% but Laxdivina, a paladin, was the last person alive and killed Vael as he blew up. So really we tied Vael. It was actually pretty freaking cool. We were pretty sure we’d lost. Hooray! Someone is doing an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression and calling Lax “The Last Action Hero”.
  
• (7:47) - Nyva, one of our hunters just got his Dragonstalker Belt, completing his 8 piece set. Hooray Nyva!
• (8:02) - We’re clearing trash to get to the third boss, Broodlord. It’s pretty boring, but I’ll try to get you some nice pictures.
• (8:08) - 40 vs 1 hardly seems fair…
  
• (8:13) - Dragons everywhere!
  
• (8:21) - The suppression room. About as much fun as it looks.
  
• (8:32) - Burn them all! We basically just move from cubby hole to cubby hole using area of effect spells on the tiny dragons and direct damage spells on the big ones.
  
  The lags still not great. Ironically we play on one of the first servers released and one of the highest population ones. But all the new hardware Blizzard has just started installing is being given to the newer and lower population servers. Yeah, none of us understand it either.

• (8:39) - Our resident DJ Kayden has started playing music over Ventrilo. My requests for Michael Jackson have thus far been denied. Instead we get Dane Cook. Stand up comedy makes this clear much more bearable.
• (8:55) - Supression room part 2. You can see Broodlord at the end of the hall.
• (9:10) - Broodlord is big and scary. And he hits retardedly hard. And he makes an ugly corpse. He has an attack that can nearly one shot our tanks called “mortal strike”. If we get one right before he casts his area of effect blast wave it’s bye-bye tank. This happens at least once per fight. I feel bad for the warriors and their massive repair bills.

  

• (9:28) - Time for more trash pulls. This is pretty much my least favorite part of the instance. It’s really boring but if people stop paying attention you can still wipe really easily.

  

• (9:39) - Meet Scarpa! He likes long walks on the beach, candlelit dinners and World of Warcraft. He looks like he’s wearing a quilt. But that’s only because he is.
  
• (9:54) - We’re on Firemaw. This boss is all about getting as many people out of line of sight of the boss as possible. There’s also a debuff that stacks on the tank. With high enough fire resist you’re supposed to be able to resist enough of it to get the debuff to reset. Operative word is “supposed to”. Usually if you get over 12 or 14 stacked you’re pretty screwed. We’ve hit 22 before. Random numbers are a pain in the ass. Firemaw is one of the three drakes. They’re all pretty similar in abilities and each has a chance to drop the set gloves or other multi-class items.
  
• (10:03) - Even more trash. After we get past these packs there’s 2 bosses, 1 trash pull, 2 bosses and we’re done. I don’t know what the point of having us fight through all this boring trash every week is, but I’m pretty sure I hate whoever came up with that as an idea for instance design. It’s just boring. And dull. And tedious.
• (10:10) - The lag is back. I am currently watching my friend Chaostrider attacking a wall. He’s really laying into it. Show that wall who’s boss Chaos!
• (10:30) - Some people have asked what I actually do in the instance. I haven’t been talking about it mostly because I didn’t think it would be interesting. But it turns out some people are curious. Mostly I play the healing mini-game in WoW: Keep the green bars full. I have the health bars of the whole raid open on my screen and I just watch for people getting low. When they get low, I cast a heal on them. Because my healing spells take either 1.5 or 2.5 seconds it can be a little nerve racking as you wait to see whether you saved someone or not. Oh, I also cast buff spells on people every 15 minutes. That’s pretty much about it. Occasionally I get to stun something.

  The only problem with this liveblog is that I keep having to look away. I think I’ve let my warrior die like 6 times. Sorry Indy!
  Of course it’s not totally my fault, I’m still getting 2 second lag on my instant cast spells. Someone suggested we lead a 40-man raid on Blizzards offices. The someone else pointed out that we’d just get arrested. And there’s no WoW in jail.

• (11:02) - Time for Ebonroc. Quick, everyone group up under the leaking vats of acid!
  

• (11:23) - Killed Ebonroc, fighting Flamegor. Drop him like he’s hot!
  
• (11:37) - Time for Chromaggus. My job for this fight is basically to stand up against a wall and mash one button. Since all I have to do is basically cast a dispel spell I have a nifty addon called Decursive that all but automates it for me. Total easymode. Chromag’s room looks pretty cool, check out the dead dragons hanging from the ceiling.
• (11:50) - Everytime you fight Chromaggus he picks two abilities, or “breaths” he is going to use. The hardest of these is called “Time Lapse”. We’ve gotten it the last 5 weeks. Guess what we got this week…
  Here’s some Big Doggy Dragon Butt for you.
  

• (12:03) - When you start the last boss in the instance Nefarian you get the same “pick two abilities” thing, except it’s the colors of the dozens of monsters he spawns on you. The hardest of the combinations is Blue and Red. We just got Blue and Red. Sigh. We’ll start the Nefarian fight in about 15 minutes.
• (12:08) - Nefarian really needs to get a better interior decorator.
  
• (12:28) - Wiped on Nefarian. We were doing great for the first half of Phase 1 of the fight. Then the monsters we were supposed to be keeping under control started spawning in clusters and killed everyone. Stupid server lag. I wish Blizzard would put a LITTLE effort into fixing this. It’s really frustrating when you have something on farm status and server issues cause you to wipe. Our execution is flawless and we’re stymied by forces beyond our control. Bah.
• (12:30) - Some people have asked about my UI. I’m mostly using a beta version of Nurfed which you can get here. I’ve also got CTRaidAssist, Decursive, TitanBar, Fastcast (so good it must be an exploit), Superinspect, Scrolling Comabt Text and a few other things. You can grab most of these from WorldofWar’s UI section.
• (12:59) -Well, we’re done for the night. We got the same bugged spawns that we did last attempt, but we fought through it. Unfortunately, probably due to the lag, Nefarian did not go into phase 2. So we sat there killing his spawns, waiting, and waiting and then dying. And dying. We’re calling it for the night, we’ll probably come back tomorrow to try and kill him in the hopes that the server is more stable.

Well that’s it for tonight folks. I hope you enjoyed our raid even if we didn’t manage to finish. I’ll try to update tomorrow when we kill Nefarian. Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave comments or questions.