Mana Tombs Run #1

I ran Mana Tombs yesterday for the first time with some guildies in hopes of getting better gear. The run was really a bonus for my day...I had been spending some of my holiday morning playing and was getting ready to log out when a guild member noted that there were two 64's and a 66 online, so "let's run them through something." Nice. It was a moderately successful run...the loot didn't drop and I died about fifteen thousand times, but I always enjoy seeing a new dungeon for the first time. I did get some nice pieces of gear from the quests. Plus, next time I won't be so clueless (and will have found some shadow-resistance gear!).

Our starting group consisted of a 70 shaman (mainly healing), a 70 warrior, two other druids (66 feral and 64 feral/balance), and me (64 boomkin). Not an ideal group -- having three druids hurt all of our chances to get each drop -- but good enough. Off we went, plowing through the initial trash and making our way to Pandemonius without much trouble. The 66 feral druid was acting as our tank and held him against the wall nicely while the rest of us pounded away. I was a little slow to recognize that when he goes all ghostly he's going to reflect my spells back at me, but figured it out in time to not hurt myself too badly. He dropped [Creepjacker] which nobody really needed, but that's the fun of random drops, right?

Onward we pressed to Tavarok, wiping one time when we pulled too many trash mobs at once. Fun. At some point on our way to Tavarok, our warrior swapped to his mage toon which helped with the rest of the instance. We pushed through the rest of the trash (dropping some boots which would have been lovely, except that I already had [Grim Boots of the Invoker]) and spanked Tavarok without *too* much trouble. I honestly don't remember what he dropped, but again it wasn't anything useful for me.

The rest of the trash didn't pose a great deal of difficulty, although I did die a few times when we pulled too many, but we managed to avoid complete wipes. Apparently I can pull quite a bit of aggro if I'm not careful. I'm decently armored against physical damage but have about no shadow resistance, resulting in many of my deaths. I staved off a few with timely self-heals or pots, but most of the times I died so fast I honestly wasn't sure what hit me. Phooey.

Nexus-Prince Shaffar was a pretty easy kill. I think I did a decent job dropping the Ethereal Beacons as they appeared and put a decent hurt on Shaffar myself. Yet again, the loot he dropped wasn't useful, but there you go. We burned through the escort quest at the end with relative ease and were done after about two hours.

I turned in the two Consortium quests and picked up [Haramad's Leggings of the Third Coin] and the [Cryo-mitts], as well as almost enough rep to bring me to friendly. I need to learn about sockets, now that I have pants that accept jewels. Fun!