Went to Karazhan with some buddies. We goofed off, we dawdled around, we didn’t take anything seriously and eventually we called it after Curator cause we got all-tuckered-out, little kid style.

Beastmaw Pauldrons dropped off of Opera. I’d forgotten these even existed. Eagerly I Needed them, knowing that my shoulders are one of my few remaining non-epic pieces. Went to Scryer bank later to get them ‘chanted up, aaaand…

Whaddaya know, they aren’t quite as good as my gemmed-up Beast Lord Mantle. I mean they’d get me some Stamina, Int, and Mp5, but at the cost of crit and AP? I don’t recall having any major stamina or intellect issues in what I’ve been doing lately, so that’s a noper. Plus, Beast Lord gets me my lovely, lovely trap-cooldown set bonus. <3 Still, I'm keeping the Pauldrons tucked away in the case of having to do gear-swapping later down the line (similar to how I have like four different neckpieces in my bank, all with varying degrees of crit, hit, AP, and stam). Dunno if I'll have to do much gear-juggling with WotLK so soon, but better to be safe than sorry eh? Just a friendly reminder from Pike that shiny new gear isn't always as awesome as it looks and that you should take your current situation into consideration. Ya wanna hear a funny story though? We PuG'd this rogue and right about the time everybody was getting in Vent when we were starting, the most obnoxious guy in the world shows up in our channel, making a total of ten of us there. He was loud, woefully uncouth, and prone to yelling out various things about people's moms and wanting chicken. I mean, I'm all for groan-worthy and/or terrible humor, but only when it's pulled off well and not, well... idiotically and LOUDLY. Within five minutes the rest of us had him on Mute and the guy musta eventually figured out that nobody was replying to him cause he left the channel. Later we're at Moroes and we tell the rogue to get back on Vent so we can talk strategy. He informs us that we never gave him the info. We all sort of collectively blinked and gave him the Vent info and he logs in and... is not the obnoxious guy.

So who the heck was that random guy who showed up in our channel right at the same time as the rest of us?

We have no idea. Ah well.

Best part of the night was our warlock and main tank secretly logging into each other’s accounts for the first pull. I… don’t believe I’ve ever seen a pull go as horribly as that one did. Like, think of the worst possible pull ever, and you’ll be able to envision what I saw and the horror that I felt when our legendary tank seemingly forgot how to hold aggro. And then the realization afterwards that we’d all been punked. It was amazing. I <3 my friends.