Facebows

Bows in this game are a little strange. Crossbows look mostly like crossbows and guns look mostly like guns, but bows? Roughly 2 out of every 3 bows has a face as its central element. The "Cataclysm blue-quality bow" model, used for Amber Messenger amongst others, has sort of a random scarred dwarven/earthen face on it. My trusty old Bristleblitz Striker has Archimonde's face as its central visual design element (as well as a pretty wtf name). And now I've got this:

I guess his chin serves as a wrist guard?

But hey, finally I've got a 359 weapon, yaaay! Atramedes is a pretty fun encounter, and I was proud of a little raidleading moment I had in it. Our first attempt stayed alive pretty well but used too many gongs and we died to searing flames. Further attempts had peoples' sound getting high to the point where they fell over dead from unhealable amounts of damage, and one raider suggested we use more than one gong per ground phase.

I had a moment of resistance, because I was like "but what if we run out of gongs!??" But then I reminded myself of one of my own maxims: Fix The Problems You Have. And the problem we had was people dying to too much sound. So we used the raider's suggestion and killed him fairly cleanly on the final pull of the night. Hooray!

Pradzha looks a little strange right now because she's T11 from the waist down and pre-raid blues from the torso up. That'll sort itself out over time, although shoulders are going to have to wait until Nef is dead, and he's going to be the last thing we kill, so it'll be a bit. I'm confident we'll get it done before T12 hits, though, which will be pretty neat. We'll still be behind the top progression guilds on the server because we'll have little to no heroic gear, but we'll at least start at the same time as they do, whereas we started T11 about a month and a half behind everyone else.

I'm still coming to grips with the February 22nd hotfixes, so I haven't updated the MM guide yet. I'll try to have that done within a week or so, though. It's tough to get a feel for them, as you can't really just go test or practice things on the target dummies, since they all activate careful aim and we don't supply ourselves with the very important 10% haste buff. Still, it feels like maybe the suggested cycle of dumping focus with arcanes either doesn't have enough room to squeeze everything in between Chimeras or wastes a lot of focus. Let's hope I'm just doing it wrong!