Carrie & I, of late, have been spending our Thursday and Friday evenings running what is known as "a raid." Yes, we break open a bottle of wine, order a pizza, and settle in with eight buddies that we've mostly never seen before. And then, we venture into the mysterious tower of Karazhan, in World of Warcraft.

"Kara," as the kids call it, is the centerpiece of this most recent WoW expansion. It's not the toughest thing going, by any means, but it's the first raiding-quality dungeon that Blizzard aimed at smaller guilds. Originally, the game had stuff to do with five people... or stuff to do with forty people. There wasn't a lot of middle ground. So, when at some point you realized you'd exceeded the challenge of the five person stuff, you had to make a huge organizational jump in order continue advancing your character and gets the shiny loots.

There were a few dungeons aimed at 10-15 people, but to really find the interesting boss fights and newer, better rewards, it was 40 or the highway. And forty folks makes it kind of inevitable that the discourse level is going to sink down to the daring wit of "your mom!"

Karazhan fixed a lot of this for smaller guild. We're a pretty active guild, but we also have folks with diverse interests and skill levels, not to mention scheduling conflicts. So, a really big dungeon aimed at ten skilled players? Gravy, baby.

When we started on this endeavor in May, we had interest, but we were kind of lacking in gear and experience. So... we spent a month or two hitting our heads against the first few bosses, feeling frustrated, wondering when the tide would turn. And, little by little, it did. Carrie grokked the roster organizing issues needed to ensure we'd have a good shot against various parts of the dungeon. I fussed with our lineup and folks roles until our tanking and healing were a nice strong base to support our damage-dealers with. We learned strategies. We educated folks on gameplay. And....

Well, this week, I took a couple of movies to demonstrate our progress.

First off, Moroes, the second boss in the dungeon (and the first one you can't skip).
Moroes has four guys helping him. You have to deal with those four guys somehow, by controlling them or killing them, before you can work on the actual boss. Normally we deal with this by bringing plenty of crowd control, and dragging these other guys out of the way. But we've been noticing our main tank is pretty tough lately -- so this is us using raw brute force to blow out this fight:

Sorry, my camera's pulled back pretty far in that one -- first try at this sort of thing.

Second is the guy who lives at the top of the dungeon. We killed him the first time last week. This week, Chris & I both shot video of the fight, and I messed around with the new iMovie to mix it together:

So, if you find yourself wondering what the heck I do in my leisure time... now you know.