In other news ...

... Andro joined a couple of VoA pugs over the weekend. The first was a 10-man group that

was mostly members of a single guild who needed some extra bodies. We targetted Emalon first and despite one little accident, were successful in bringing him down (by first success on him!) followed by a short and brutal slaying of Archavon. A distinct lack of mahe loot though (as ever ... I've yet to see any mage gear there!)

The same group invited me along to Ulduar, but I demured saying my gear (mainly heroic/crafted stuff) wasn't up to it. The person I was chatting with felt I'd be okay, but it soon became irrelevant when they changed the target to the Obsidian Sanctum - as a 25-man raid. I'd only been there once before (on a guild look-see earlier in the week) but we had solid leadership and decent players all round and blitzed out way through. I died once (to the fire waves on Sarth .. it was my first time fighting him) but the raid got him down on the second attempt. As ever, no mage loot though.

My 25-man visits to VoA were another kettle of fish. The first one targetted Emalon first and was doing moderately well until someone disco'd (a healer or tank - not sure which) and things folded. The promptly followed several rounds of recrimination and name calling (my favourite was "Ddo you know who I am? You can't talk to me like that!") and people going "its too hard" (despite putting out something in the region of 30k dps across the raid ...). The raid broke up at that point, but at least as there'd been no boss kill I wasn't saved.

I joined another raid later in the day, and this one blitzed its way to Archavon with no problems. He went down like a sack of spuds ... and then several people immediately hearthed out before any attempt could be made on Emalon. The numbers quickly escalated and the raid folded. Talking on guildchat I gathered it was a common issue and the reason why a lot of raids were going for Emalon first (to avoid people getting locked to a half-complete instance).