Raids

It’s true. We’ve started a new guild on Sen’jin. Including Josh’s wife, we have 6 toons, I believe. We’ll be playing Saturday mornings until around noon, Central Time. Friday night, I got Priestr up to level 5 before logging off. I arose early at 8am to get going again, only to find 2 players already on. We ran all over Dun Morough and I logged off after lunch at level 9.

Saturday night, I watched my roommate’s copy of Firefly on DVD and started falling asleep before 8pm during the second episode. GREAT story line, but I was wiped from all the WoW earlier.

Sunday afternoon, I played for a bit, and the Bloggers were on again. We hit Vargash and I got a nice leggings upgrade. We went to the quarry after that, and with 5 people, there was no need for me to heal people. At one point I started jumping up and down asking that they notice that there was a healer in their midst. “Could someone please take a LITTLE damage?” That didn’t work, so I started casting Smite instead.

We put a level cap of 20 on people by next Saturday. We want to be able to hit Deadmines, but not be too varying in levels. If we’re on together, we’ll group, otherwise we’ll be ready to take down VC this weekend.

Sunday night was my second MC run. I logged in with plenty of time to account for long character screen loading and waited for the appointed time. As the buffs began, we got kicked. The whole raid group went back to the character loading screen. As people got back in, things got sillier. As the buffs began the second time, we all got the ominous yellow server text: “Server restart in 15:00.”

Now what to do? It was decided to start a raid on another server with level 1 toons. After trying 10 servers that either had queues or long load screens, we went to Twisting Nether. Great!! I already have Gitr there as a lvl 16 big brother. We decided to start a herd of cows … er … Tauren. Enter Gitr’s problem. Apparently PvP servers don’t allow you to have toons of both factions. I was stuck as Gitr for the duration, so I went to Westfall as I hear all the laughter and playing over TeamSpeak. I ran to my roomie’s room to see what it looked like. I decided to give them some fun though and sicced my guild on them as they were running through Barrens.

… or I tried to. A couple of level 60s thought the sight of 25 cows running through Crossroads was so funny, he was going to ensure safe passage. Poor Shawzaa was a level 20 Warlock and clearly did not die from any of the cows. Eventually, they ran all the way to Oggrimar and got a guild charter and formed a guild.

It was 10pm when we were finally able to start first pull. I was having trouble in the first couple of fights. I think it was partly that I’ve been playing priest and partly because I kept drawing aggro. I was trying to use Recap for the first time and couldn’t be sure that it was doing the stats correctly, so I ended up resetting the stats as soon as we physically crossed the first bridge. I think it is missing the stats for 4 trash mobs, but ended up looking like this:

I couldn’t be happier with those stats with the weapons I have and how many times I died before I got a tip from Fish (out MT) to stop spamming Heroic Strikes because the threat generated was more than his, especially when combined with my threat-generating crits. I kept hearing the darn aggro alert horn with every mob. Sometimes I died, sometimes I got a heal in time.

We made our way to Luci, but that is about all there is to tell. By then, we were down to 32 players and ended our attempts with 29 due to some raid drama. The first 3 or 4 times, a surger and all the imps came from the cave next to us. We weren’t sure who pulled them, but our last attempt was clean. It was just clear that we didn’t have enough people to take him down. If I end up tanking, things are getting bad. They got bad. As a funny ending, one of our pallys bubbled right as he was the last man standing and took a licking from Luci personally. It was humorous enough that I wish I got a screenshot.

Gitr has seen the whole spectrum in his 5 visits to ZG. He’s seen 2 wipes on Venoxis weeks after the guild started ZG runs AND has seen Mandokir drop on the first attempt with 10 n00bs in the group. Maybe I was operating under the assumption that Mandokir was easy, since my first run wasn’t even close to being close. The next run after that, we dropped Thekal in 2 tries. A huge success for those involved.

Then there’s last night. We took down Venoxis in the first try, and only one person died… after the fight… in a cloud. Then there were 3 tries on Mandokir, and none of them were close. I don’t know why, either. That’s what’s frustrating for me with, I don’t know…maybe it’s my point of view in the fight, my awareness in a raid, or just plain n00bishness. If someone in the guild who wasn’t there asked me what went wrong, my best answer was that Mandokir killed us faster than we killed him.

We tried both tactics of tanking the raptor or just taking him down. The only thing that I can think of is that we were down to 2 priests, 2 druids, and a pally. If we had unlimited heals, we could have stayed in there and dps’d the tar out of him or kept shooting away. Whatever it was, things weren’t working time and time again.

As far as personal development, I’m getting the hang of DPS now. Up until the Venoxis fight, I was #3 on the damage meter, only behind 2 hunters. After the fight, I was at #5 with 2 mages climbing ahead of me. The hill up to Mandokir kills my damage because of the Bloodrinkers, but I got back up to #7 during the attempts on Mandokir. Now that I’m getting comfortable in my new role of not drawing aggro, but still beating the crap out of things, I want to see what I do in UBRS if there is a MT. On the way to Marshall Windsor last night, I was #1 with a 59 and 57 rogue, 60 druid, and a 60 hunter. It wasn’t even close. I had 32% of the damage and took 47% at the same time while in battle stance the whole run. THAT was fun.

I know that sounds like an episode of Monk or another Ernest movie, but I can’t help it. That was just too cool of a place to have a normal post’s title. Three words: Molton Core’s awesome.

A quick summary in short words: login trouble, bad pull, wipe, wipe, kick, wipe, call.

Now for some of that to make sense. It was a terrible night, but I was still estatic after waiting sooooo long to get there. After getting home at 7:50 for an 8:30 run, I immediately signed onto TeamSpeak to listen to stuff and let them know I was signing on. Two things were going on that were really annoying us: inability to log in and a GM ticket that they didn’t seem to care about.

Apparently in the first run that started at 4:00, the group took down Lucifron, but didn’t get any reputation or loot. Just an empty corpse. As of 12:30am, still no response from Blizzard. Thanks a lot guys. Now the word is out that your GMs just ignored us all night. Great customer service. If any of us had a life, we’d do something else tonight to protest. LOL.

The logins were getting crazy. Sometimes it would say it couldn’t connect. Other times, it would handshake and say that it couldn’t connect to World of Warcraft and to try again later. It took me 15-20 tries to get in. I went to the AH and got 5 Mongoose pots and 5 more major healing pots. I already had 3 rage pots. I was ready to go. I touched the crystal and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I was finally here. Molton Core.

Time for the first pull on the repops since the last run. It was a disaster. A corehound on patrol sensed the commotion when he got to the bridge and came over. We had a surger, fire lord, and a corehound. The last 10 standing ran for then entrance to reset. Not a good start, but I still didn’t care that I was dead. I was in Molton Core.

We made it all the way to Ghennis, taking down the repops just fine and I was bouncing between 5th and 6th on the damage meter. Once we got into the general area of Ghennis, I died a time or two from various corehound issues. We had so many n00bs there, setting up the pull for Ghennis took so long, a surger AND a fire lord repopped in the middle of the fight. Nice wipe. We were able to rez the group and reclear.

As we were setting up the second attempt on Ghennis’ life, conversation on TS took a bad turn and the topic turned to someone’s spec and said, “well, if you weren’t such an @$$hole..” He got an immediate kick from the raid and a pull to another channel on TS for a conference with the officers. Things got pretty quiet on the mics for a while. I’m not sure, but I think his GM /gkicked him right then and there. The second time, a corehound repopped during the fight. Bad wipe. We had to release and run.

By this time, several trash mobs had repopped and we had to fight our way down again for our third try. For some reason, our second attempt was a lot better than our last. He only got down to 59% before the last man standing fell. As far as bosses goes, it was an unmitigated disaster of a night. If there was a silver lining on that black cloud, it was that we got 4 BoE epic drops because the same trash mobs kept dropping stuff on the way to Ghennis. Nothing for the plate wearers, though. I’ve gotta go a lot more times to get enough points to show up on the loot map.

As for the stats below, I would have had a lot more damage if i had a bit more armor to stop dying so stinking often. That combined with the notorious trumpet call from CT Raid that told me I had aggro. I don’t survive long under an onslaught from a corehound without my shield and normal healing. About 3 seconds to be precise. The next warrior on the list was Vorpigga. The order was rogue, rogue, warlock, hunter, ??, hunter, Gitr. I’m feeling good about possibly being a capable end-game player once I get geared up. This is going to be fun.

At 11:00 we officially called it and I officially called for a Baron run. We 10-manned it in 38 minutes and I got the Baron’s cloak. We have enough people in the guild that have alts reaching 60 now that Baron runs are not a chore for them because they need stuff, too. Half-way through, I reached Honored with Argent Dawn. I think now is the time to turn in my rep stones to Chillwind Camp.

Gitr is going for the full Valor set. Yes, I know, there are a LOT of people out there that would love to write a long thing about how many sets are better and which pieces add up to a better match for a fury warrior. I’m going for it for 2 reasons. I want to have the satisfaction of setting out for that accomplishment of running instances until the piece drops and I win the roll. That’s huge. The other reason is simply the raid experience. I’ll learn my character so much better in a 10-man that we run over and over again than only playing ZG and MC once a week each.