So this is what the sparkly pony was made for!

Right. As you may know I am an avid collector of titles. They are shiny and some of them are quite cool even. A few of them are rarer than others, obviously. I think the titles "the Patient" and "Jenkins" scare me the most when I join a random PUG. Of course I am aware that some people might display them intentionally - but if those are the only ones?

Anyway.. back to the topic at hand. I personally like "Salty Snack", I did like "Chef Koch" back when that was still my name. Highish level dungeon titles are also rather nice. Of course those slowly decay with the introduction of new gear. While "of the Nightfall" was incredibly impressive a year ago, it's now something pickup groups do on a slow Saturday afternoon.

And then there are the exceptions. Titles that stay impressive or just nice even after a content patch has come and gone.

This is (sort of) the story of one of them.

It all started here, really. The celestial planetarium just looks lovely. The entrance hall is decorated nicely as well, but somehow I didn't feel like overloading the blog completely with images (and I'll stick to that story - nothing to do with taking screenshots with my messy UI in the foreground, no siree!).

Good old Brann helpfully did the usual thing - left us with all the work and ran off to the other side of Ulduar to play computer games. Seriously... does the think that "I'll try and buy you some time with the archive console" fools anyone?

And because a proper boss requires a proper entry, Algalon did us the favour of a sparkly lightshow. It only gave me slight motion sickness - something I have not experienced since the days of my first driving lessons (and that one time - no... not in band camp - on a boat, off the channel coast).

Commence the usual stuff. Tanks taking tons of damage, healers healing all of it and more, mighty mages shooting fireballs arcane missiles, warlocks setting stars on fire. It took us more than one attempt - the incoming damage is rather on the high side. I think my personal favourite is the damage taken from his Ascend to the Heavens spell. Hardly ever took more than half a million points of damage in one hit before.

In the end it was one of those wins that no one really believed in. One of our healers was wondering if she had shielded the wrong target, two people were dead on the floor, everyone was still half-hiding inside a black hole and Algalon does not do the raid the favour of actually falling over. He just sort of walks back to the middle and pops open his treasure chest.

His sparkly treasure chest.

Full of stars and ponies and such (disclaimer: None of that is actually true).

Much like Onyxia, Nefarian, Hakkar, C'thun, and Ossirian he drops an item. Same as the other items listed, the associated NPCs do celebrate the return of the victorious heroes. And much as I have trouble putting this into words, it was actually a rather nice feeling - to know that tonight we saved the whole of Azeroth from destruction. They even did a nice little lightshow for us in Dalaran.

Which only left one thing to do, really. Hop on my little sparkly pony and...

No.

Not that one.

As I was saying, there was only one thing left to do. Hop on my sparkly pony, fly high over Dalaran and proudly display the new title. Starcaller Snack.

Sounds like something out of a Japanese vending machine.

And I'm still happy about the title. Damn lovely night, this.