Hey all, this is an RP story from back when Jinjiro was a human (my char on Scarshield Legion). I posted it in the forums but Anub thought it might be good to chuck it on the blog and graciously gave me an account to do so!

Enjoy!

Wind whipped at the solitary rider, high above the sweltering canyons and mines of the Searing Gorge, as he tightly gripped the reins of the armoured war gryphon that bore him swiftly away from the scene of the crime. Smoke rose up from the great forges and lava-filled trenches of the huge ravine below him, creating grey tentacles that clutched at the night sky, streaks of darker black against the night sky.

…and smoke curled languidly up from the small bonfire, as the small child sat, poking the lazily glowing ashes with a thin branch, gazing up at the throng of men that moved about him, oblivious. Men who roasted pigs over much larger, roaring flames, and laughed gruffly, pouring greasy-looking liquid down their throats…

As the great winged beast soared higher on a warmer blanket of air, making the aerial ride slightly more comfortable, Jinjiro glanced down at his right hand, blood still staining his skin where it had gushed outwards from the surely fatal wound he had inflicted on the General.

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Jomotei revved the engine and felt a slight chill run up her spine. She couldn’t quite decide if the exhileration she felt was due to the powerful rumble of the engine beneath her or the fact that she was putting her trust in a machine cobbled together by a crazy, undead engineer. Well, if it did explode, she’d go out with a bang at least. Literally.

After finally managing to drag my farmbot druid with herbalism, mining and epic flight form to level 77 for Cold-Weather Flying a little while back, I counted my gold yesterday and found I’d scrounged up enough gold to buy the Mechano-Hog I’d had my eye on. I was fortunate enough to know an engineer I’d trust with 12.500 gold + a bunch of expensive mats in Jinjiro and he crafted the bike in a matter of minutes. That’s either evidence of great skill and efficiency or he’s as crazy as a bat and doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing and I’ll probably die in a blaze of glory soon.

At any rate, the two of us had some awesome fun just tearing around Dalaran on my new bike. I’ve already had a Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth since I dinged level 74, and while the hog can’t advertise the usefulness of vendors, I have to say that it’s a more fun mount when it comes to pure riding.

I decided to make a blog post about the fun we had and frapsed us driving around like maniacs and jumping off Dalaran. While I was putting the video together I had the idea to turn it into an advertisement for Jinjiro’s services as a little thank you for his help. If it could send some customers his way and help him make enough gold to one day craft a hog for his own use, that’d be really awesome.

Hope you enjoy the clip, I had great fun making it. I recommend downloading it (27.5MB) as the text bubbles at the end are hard to make out when watching the stream.

Download movie in better quality (27.5MB) *recommended*

It was another afternoon in Dalaran. Everywhere you looked, bank alts were bustling to and from mailboxes, oblivious to the world around them. If you listened closely as they passed by you could hear them muttering to themselves as they tried to recall recipe requirements or add up all the gold coins jingling in their bags and pouches. Unfortunately, we were on our level 80 mains and bored out of our skulls.

“Hey,” someone suggested, “let’s go kill Sartharion.” As good a plan as any when you’ve got little better to do and your guild has stopped scheduling 10-man outings in favour of 25-man raids. There was just one small problem. There weren’t 10 of us.

A quick head count revealed we had 8 people and so we figured we might as well go with that for the Less is More achievement. But now another small problem reared its head; the group was a merry band of misfits. Our maintank had joined with his undergeared warlock alt. Instead, our group’s tank would be a death knight who usually fills a dps role. One of our dpsers was a pvp rogue, a friend of the guild. Most ominously of all, we had only one healer.

We blew caution to the wind, rolled up our sleeves and set off. I recorded the adventure that followed and decided to upload a video of the Sartharion encounter because I thought it was pretty impressive that our shaman, Argha, was able to solo-heal the instance.

Download in better quality (62MB)

I’d like to note that Sartharion himself was surprisingly easy, even with our silly setup. The trash was in fact more challenging as there was much more damage for the healer to handle. Given that it can be solo-healed, you can probably do Sartharion himself with a lot fewer than 8 if you had a well-balanced group of top geared and properly spec’d characters. Maybe something to try in the future. 5-man Sartharion, anyone?

Well, sort of.*

I recently had some time between raid days and decided to spec BM and take Sinh, my favorite pet, out for a walk. Poor thing’s been locked up in the stables for ages, so I thought I’d let him have some fun and headed down to Dustwallow Marsh to venture into the lair of Onyxia, broodmother of the Black Dragonflight.

Soloing Onyxia is kind of old hat at this point, but I figured doing it with a ferocity pet like the spirit beast, which lacks all the nice tanking talents of a tenacity pet, might make it slightly more challenging. I did spec myself and my pet to give him as much survivability as possible, though, but as it turned out, it was no challenge at all. All hail the mighty Sinh!

It seems Onyxia hits like a wet noodle these days and with 75% of its breath damage mitigated by the Avoidance talent, it turned out that I didn’t even have to use Mend Pet to heal him. He kept himself at full health through Bloodthirsty combined with Spirit Bond and the tier 5 set bonus.

I should mention that I didn’t bother re-glyphing from my MM raiding spec in case anyone is wondering why I don’t use serpent sting much in the video. That said, hope you enjoy it!

Download video (110MB) *recommended*

*The title is obviously a bit of a conceit, but refers to the fact that I was able to solo Onyxia without actively healing my pet. Obviously the tier 5 set bonus passively heals it for a good deal.

Same movie, more actors.

This was our first scheduled evening trying Malygos in heroic mode, and even though we were a few people short than what we expected we managed to take him down after a few tries.

Some of our raid members hadn’t had the chance to do the 10-men raid earlier due to us focusing on other 25-men content, so this was a first time for them. Personally, I can’t deny I would have liked there to have been something different from the 10-men version other than bigger numbers, but oh well.

Nice to see our recruitment efforts are coming to fruition.

We’ve just switched our raiding schedule to focus fully and only on 25-men raids, and it was encouraging to finally have the numbers to clear heroic Naxxramas.

Since I’m posting this a day late we’ve already had the chance to go back there on the next reset and clear the place again in not much more than three hours.

Fantastic work and focus from everyone who participated in both these raid days, and congratulations to those who got loot, especially our lucky two Rogues who have both already secured their shining daggers.