The Caverns of Time

I had intended to spend very little time playing games last night.  I needed to log into WoW and do my dailies and then I wanted to log out and do something low key like read a book or just sleep.  However, I made the mistake of hooking up with some guild mates to blaze through the Argent Tournament dailies and save myself some time.  What took place after clicking the “Accept Group Invite” button was a whirlwind of blood, sweat and tears, followed by a sense of dread at how I will manage to function at work the next day, given the ungodly hour at which I was going to sleep.

First we quickly knocked out all the Argent Tournament dailies.  While clying over to Chillmaw’s area my guild mates noticed that I was still flying on the same swift flying mount I had since TBC.  “Don’t you have a dragon yet?”, asked one of my guildies.  I explained that I was working on the Wyrmrest rep to be able to buy a red one.  They then informed me that you could get one by running The Culling of Stratholme instance and reaching the end within 30 minutes, and offered to run me through it.  “Fantastic!”, I thought.  I am not one to look a free drake in the mouth.  So we down Chillmaw, steam rolling some alliance players in the process who had been camping the area, killing off newbies.  Then we hearth to Dalaran, hop in the portal, and less than 30 minutes later:

During this run I was on Ventrilo, chatting with my guild mates and getting to know them better.  They took a look at my woefully underpowered gear and started making suggestions on what I could do to improve.  This led to the suggestion of running a trail of heroics and the ToC 5 man on repeat in order to gear me up a bit.  Here is what ended up happening:

and

and lastly …

I got a TON of great loot.  I got a number of upgrades for my Protection spec and a slew of items to start my retribution or Holy off-spec, all iLevel 200 or higher.  On top of all of this, I managed to max out my rep with Wyrmrest and started working on Kirin Tor next.  Not only was it a ton of fun, but for the first time in a long time I felt the bonds of the guild growing.  I have personal friends in the guild, but the people I ran with last night were strangers to me.  They just wanted to gear me up and help raise the ability of the guild as a whole.  The power level of my paladin skyrocketed last night, not only in terms of gear power, but also in terms of building confidence in my ability to tank high level encounters and in terms of camaraderie with my guild mates.

Oh! I am also 10 tokens away from finishing up Brewfest.  Should have it all wrapped up today after I get home.  After that … my first big time guild run.  We are hitting up 10 man ToC, followed by the 10 man Onyxia fight.  Should be fun.