My love affair with Old Painless, the Horde gunship cannon.

First, let me apologize for the lack of continual updates. While I don't mean to be so lax, sometimes the muse just isn't there, or insert your own cliche excuse here. I'll admit, I honestly didn't have much to write about, things were keeping at the status quo. I get bored easily. I think when faced with repetition, especially in World of Warcraft, that type of boredom breeds laxity. Don't believe me? Ask one of my main tanks. He's famous for, being THE FAMOUS UNBEARABULL™, mysteriously disappearing mid-fight. Well, not so much disappearing, as much as he just floats. You know those kind of people? They're there, but they might be just a little slow in clicking the ready check, or they might seem like they're constantly working against a wall of lag...but really? They're watching the Winter Olympics, and I'm not even talking about the good events here. They're watching the 30k cross-country skiing marathon. If you're going to watch a skiing event, at least watch the one where they're shooting at stuff.

Anyway, we all float from time to time. That's why its called putting bosses on farm. Nothing out of the ordinary happens, it's all wrote. This is my life, Mario. I press five buttons until the mob's head explodes and then proceed to collect their precious epics. That's fine. It happens. Granted, there are some classes that are allowed to float more than others given the constraints of the fight. Say for example the Dreamwalker fight? As a melee DPS I can do whatever I want and nobody would have any idea if I was doing the right thing. The same goes for Saurfang. As long as the boss dies, nobody's the wiser. Then again, if I were a healer on these fights, it would be a tad bit different. Though, having played a healer up through BC, I know there are fights where I can spend more time getting Seal of Wisdom procs off of a boss than actually healing a tank.

We get bored. We float. We stop posting. My apologies.

There is a way to counter this boredom, Blizzard has done a lot for it already. Blizzard has given us achievements to shoot for, little challenges that usually mean you have to pay attention to get the job done. They've also given us heroic modes, which, so far in ICC, are pretty heroic (minus the Gunship Battle, I'm pretty sure this one was easier). Though, sometimes achievements and heroic modes just won't cut it. Sometimes it takes a personal touch. In my guild it's been said that we make our own hard modes.

My hard mode was a gunship cannon named Old Painless.

It started out innocent enough. If you've been following this blog at all, one of my earlier posts involved a mathematical formula to prove that I do, in fact, do 18k DPS. While there have been doubters to said fact, the math speaks for itself, and if you don't believe the math, come check out the first few trash pulls of our 25 man ICC run. I mash Divine Storm with Seal of Cleave up like a pro while slapping out saronite bombs like some sort of funky priest. Yeah, it's boat times for sure, I spend most of the trash drinking Bailey's from a shoe.

But...those are 25 mans, and we only really spend one night a week on those at best. I wanted something more of a challenge. I needed my own hard mode. I wanted it to be...personal, and I didn't want any sort of quantifiable achievement tied to it, because those are the best kinds of challenges--the ones that nobody else gives a damn about.

Now, I'm just going to assume that most people that read this have a general idea about how the Gunship Battle plays out, if you don't...well...here's the five cent version: Two giant skyboats nearly ram into each other, big guns start firing, I jump across to the other skyboat while pretending to be Captain Jack Sparrow and that the channeling mage is the chest containing Davy Jones' heart and Muradin Bronzebeard is Davy Jones himself. At least, that's how I understood the fight at first, until I saw her.

She was quiet, and just a little bit coy. I probably wouldn't have even noticed her had it not been for her sizable showing on the WMO/WOL report. I'll admit, even I was impressed. She might not have been flashy with it, but man, her DPS output made me look like a scrub™ (that's for you, Dawnkykawng), not to be confused with your typical scrubs mind you. And isn't that when you know you're dealing with a real raider? I think those of us that actually raid seriously, or hell, even those of you that have done a random recently with one of those geared players. You know that type? The ones you know that are just in there for their frost emblems and nothing else. Regardless, she knew what she was doing, and I had to do something about it.

At first I was a bit wary of trying to match up to her DPS, the Gunship Battle isn't exactly a melee-friendly fight, and with her being ranged and having only two abilities, it'd definitely be a challenge, but it'd be my challenge.

The stage was set. The challenge was made.

It took a few weeks, a few upgrades, and even a heroic mode or two, but it finally paid off.

Reaganomics: 7485.9
Horde Gunship Cannon: 7198.2

Old Painless, if you're reading this, babe, I think we need to start seeing other people. It's not you, it's me. I'm not ready to settle down just yet, but don't worry...I'll always remember the boat times.