Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting...

We delved back into Karazhan yesterday. We got to Attumen fairly quickly this time. After a couple unfortunate waves a death, we took him down and were already farther along than last time after about an hour. We slowed down a lot after that. Several attempts and Moroes finally died, though only after we got a second priest in our group to do more shackling of undead - making me wonder how critical that may be. Up, around, and to the Maiden of Virtue we went. We died a couple times there due to touchy aggro radius and pulling her before we were ready. When we actually were prepared, we managed to slog through that fight, though we had lost a few people by the time we finished, including both tanks as I recall. Then on to the opera: Romulo and Julianne. We only got one real good attempt at that, hindered to a small degree by two of us suffering connection failure in phase 2 (but getting back in time to continue). So we'll pick up fighting our way back through that last section to them today, if we can get everyone together. It looks tricky in that both have to be killed at nearly the same time.

So, after close to 8 hours of playing with a break for dinner in there, we got a lot farther than I expected. I'd have seen taking down the first boss as success (since we didn't get that far last time). It's time consuming, though, especially when we start slowing down between pulls. We're also spending an hour or two getting people together and finding one or two people to round out the 10 needed.

I'm also finding that it's not profitable in a financial sense in game. One goes through a lot of reagents, potions, and repair funds without much recompense. Now, the boss drops are great, but you only get a couple items from each one and they may or may not be useful to anyone in the group. In most dungeons, we seem to come out ahead after dropped silver/gold and sellable stuff, but with the excessive repair costs it quickly becomes overshadowed in Karazhan.

Caught Kung Fu Panda today. Cute and fun, if not really surprising. Had a deeper emotional background behind the characters than I expected, but I wanted to see more of the Furious Five. Loved the "scroll" style of the end credits with little scenes in the background, though it does detract from reading names. But really, who just sits there to read all the names unless they're waiting to see if something's after the credits. And, naturally, there is. And for other thoughts:


Personally, I could have done without Po's epiphany of a legendary martial arts maneuver at the end. I think he was doing just fine as he was, and that cheapens things a little for me. I'd rather he won the fight just because he was perfectly suited to resisting/redirecting Tai-Lung's attacks and used the focus on the dragon scroll to his benefit. I liked it when Po was winning not because he was instantly a supreme martial artist, but because he (however incidentally) changed the conditions of the fight to favor himself.
Also, as I mentioned, I feel there's more to be told, especially around the Furious Five. For such big name actors, they didn't get that many lines. The glimpses into Tigress' background were great, setting her up as someone who could have (or still could) follow in Tai-Lung's footsteps.