BA Shared Topic: Raid's Canceled!

This week's Blog Azeroth Shared Topic was suggested by Deyndor (who, incidentally, is celebrating his first blogaversary!):

So I was talking with Eda on twitter tonight and she mentioned that she's had 4 raids in the last 2 weeks get canceled. And that got me wondering, what do people do when their raid is canceled?

I'm sure there will be the mundane like farming stuff or running heroics, but I'm sure there are a lot of people with some really interesting and fun things too. Maybe you invade an enemy capital by yourself. Maybe you go play an alt. Whatever it is, share it!

Since I found myself in the position last night of my ICC-10 raid having been canceled, I thought it was a perfect time to write about this.

I'm in a casual 10-man guild. Even though we do have about 14 or 15 raiding members we do find ourselves short on raiders from time to time. Rather than run a bunch of heroics like I probably should do (badge-gathering on my scrub mage is still ongoing), I like to use these opportunities to do something different, and get things done from my list of goals.

In this post back in January I made these plans:

1. Get Leesah to 80, into a raiding guild and get into ICC before a pre-expansion nerf (if one occurs).
2. Get a second character to 80.  Just have to decide which of several lowbies to work on first...
3. Get epic flying for at least Leesah.
4. Save up at least 10k gold before the Cataclysm.  I am terrible at saving gold so this one might be a real challenge!

Well I've taken care of 1 and 2, and I'm almost there with number 3.  Number 4 could take some time since there are always plenty of things to spend gold on.

Since that time I've added a few goals to the list:

5. Level up fishing and cooking (I've done part of this at least!) 
6. Get the Karazhan key and run it to get Attumen's mount and the Mongoose enchant, but mostly for old time's sake. 
7. Get the Explorer achievement for Aefa and add to my screenshot library (like I need more screenies) 
8. Make Aefa a flying carpet. (just a few more levels of tailoring...) 
9. Get Balindah (my shaman) to level 80.

So, to last night. We decided to form a VOA-10, pugging the missing spots. Once that was done and I had taken care of a random on each 80 for the frosties, I dragged Mengfu (my husband's shaman) into the Black Morass to finish off the Karazhan Key chain.

Karazhan, in case you are a Wrath baby, was the entry-level raid in Burning Crusade times, but it was still hard enough that you had to be pretty well-geared from heroics or crafted stuff to be able to pull your weight. I believe that to begin with, everyone had to have done the key quest chain as an attunement - the key was required for entry to the tower. This requirement was later removed, but someone with a key still has to be there to open the door for anyone without it.

The quest chain starts outside the Tower itself, in Deadwind Pass, and involves travel to places all over Azeroth and Outland including the dungeons Shadow Labyrinth, Steam Vaults, Arcatraz, Old Hillsbrad and Black Morass. If you don't have the keys for ShadowLabs or Arcatraz, there are additional chains that take you to Sethekk Halls (for ShadowLabs) and the Botanica and Mechanar (for the Arca key).  Fortunately, you only need to run the normal versions of each of these dungeons so I was able to solo all of them as Moonkin except for Mechanar - the gauntlet at the end was a bit much for my squishy feathers.  I also brought help to the Black Morass because if something goes wrong on a boss and you fail (or the second boss bugs on you and goes back to full health like it did the first time for me!!), you have to do the whole thing again. With two level 80s it was laughably easy.

So, I ended up with The Master's Key. Hooray!

Attumen the Huntsman drops Fiery Warhorse's Reins and Moroes drops the pattern for Mongoose, and those two bosses went down very easily as Moonkin with Mengfu healing.  I doubt I'd be able to solo them as Moonkin - they still hit pretty hard. No sign of the horsie this time but Moroes and his gang were nice enough to drop Mongoose right away! It was so nice to be back there again after such a long time - the music reminded us of good times, and I'll look forward to going in each week (or each time we remember) to see if we can get a horsie.


How about you?  What do you do when your raid is canceled?