kara

Raid Was a Bust; Members Fined With /gkick

February 6, 2008 By Gitr 15 Comments

Gitr went on the raid Friday night, but life has been too busy to report back. Now is a good time, but I don’t have time to get into all my details about dumping Alchemy and hitting 300 Engineering or getting up to 8k honor and having enough BG marks to get an epic when I get the honor it takes. You’ll have to come back for that. I just realized I didn’t send the screenshots to my Gmail account this morning, so this will be sans Kara screens. Sorry ’bout that.

I got to the raid an hour late due to commitments. My late arrival was planned upon, but not the pally and priest who just decided to not show up. Runnik spent the next hour getting those spots filled, and got a priest from another guild while they waited for me to OT because they were still down a healer and our Arms/Fury warrior apparently refuses to tank.

As I logged in, they cheered and then immediately boooed when the priest sent Runnik a /w and said she had to go raid with her guild. They were screaming at her. We tried to persuade her to stay and offered her a permanent spot on Team 2. I believe she is considering it for this week.

After another hour of searching, we finally got another healer who was both properly specc’d and not saved to another instance. Morons. For some reason, which (judging by the amount of cussing on Vent) infuriated the members of Team 1, there were always 2-3 people per pull that could not get it in their heads that you need to hug up against the spectral chargers to prevent the… Charge! Every friggin’ pull was a near-disaster. By the time we got to Attumen and I pulled Midnight for off-tanking, a charger… Charges! in and knocks me on my keester.

So there I am, tanking a boss and a 71 Elite at the same time. That is, until the heals didn’t come because the charger feared my healer. We spent another 45 minutes fighting our way back to Attumen and trying to slip in on a good time for the respawns, but the timing was never right. We never got all the way back before everyone was either totally broken or under 15% armor.

Our dps warrior declared the raid a bust to the raid and left. Then he told the guild in nice green letters that the raid was a bust and basically said that Team 2 sucked. Runnik and our MT had had enough. This was his last straw from a number of offenses, and they kicked him then and there, before we even got out of the instance. Within 30 minutes, our guildie healer was doing some talking and got herself kicked and banned from the forums. Yesterday when I logged in, I noticed our member count was down about 16 toons. I asked if there was an exodus or a mass-kicking. It was the latter.

The leadership had finally reached a boiling point with people being impatient with the second team, forgetting that they had progressed very slowly through Kara themselves. I heard stories of entire nights of wipes, but no one put them down. Now the Team 2 members are surrounded by a supportive group of people. Progress will probably be delayed a little, but it’s a much nicer environment now.

Keyed for Karazhan

January 30, 2008 By Gitr 19 Comments

Last night saw Gitr through the super long, 18 wave fight in Black Morass with 3 guildies and an orphan Holy paladin in CoT. It was a trial by fire, and I didn’t even know it. I’d been getting along swimmingly with one of the veteran mages in the guild, Pandara, and he was more than happy to come along to get me keyed for Friday’s milestone walk into Kara.

It was a great time for me MTing the instance with such powerful dps in the ranks (Hunter, Mage, and dps Shammy) to rip aggro away from me. The most that happened most of the time, was an occassional turn to the shammy that I taunted right back, followed by a Revenge and a couple of sunders. Being a Fury/Prot spec definitely met me with some challenges, but most of them were my own dealing with how I had my spells on my toolbars. I need to re-arrange things tonight or tomorrow before the raid.

The thrills started when Pandara ripped aggro one time and the Rift Lord shot right for him and killed him. Today I found out that one time he rocked my world by accident… that time, he did it on purpose to see what I’d do. It was not until today that I became aware that Pandara is Bp’s alt. The significance there is that Bp is our MT for Kara Team 1 and Team 2… at least until I get geared for Team 2. After that, I have no idea what Runnik’s plan is, but Bp said I have no worries about Friday, even as an OT build, and that he’d be making me do a couple of pulls to get used to taking the reigns.

To recap yesterday, I got over 2k Honor, 4 BG marks, 30 Engineering points to 261, got the shoulders off of Aeonus (Pauldrons of the Crimson Flight), and got completely keyed for Karazhan. Boy did I sleep well.

Key Fragment #2: Check

January 24, 2008 By Gitr 4 Comments

I am remiss in not updating that I got key fragment #2 on Friday last week. To get back on track, here we go.

I was questing out in SMV trying to cross off as many off my log as possible when I got a whisper from a 70 mage asking me to a group to complete a quest and that he had a full group AND could summon me AND would pay me 10g. I said I would and I was summoned to the end of the path of Elites just West of the Blood Elf outpost.

I asked what to do to help them, and they said to tank my guts out. There are going to be 4 waves, and I needed to put my game face on… I think they looked at my gear and got worried. We wiped on the first attempt when the second wave let too many mobs free on the squishies, but I think they were targeting mobs I wasn’t tanking full-time. We made it on the second attempt, and the third, and the fourth. People kept coming in the area and I was like a tanking prostitute. I never did get the gold, but I will be able to rip through this when it’s my turn to go to Black Temple.

Soon after, I got to go on another PuG with Alaron to get the fragment from Steamvaults. That was a dang easy job, and we moved on to get the third fragment. Alaron had the key to get into Arc, so we were all set, or so I thought. Anyone guess my problem last Friday? Tempest Keep? Gitr?

Right! I couldn’t fly yet! I ran to the flight point, flew to Area 52, and then got summoned to the TK meeting stone to pick up that flight point. The next thing I knew, every busted out their flying mounts. It dawned on me at that moment that I had finally reached that instance I’d read about that required a flying mount to even get to. Yeah… suck bucket!

After facing some ridicule in green text that I didn’t appreciate much, I left the group and started killing warp hunters, feeling so miserable about the let down of not finishing the fragments that I logged for the night and went to bed.

Respec

Since the Kara Team 2 for Doom’s Assailants needs an OT, and everyone keeps saying I need to return to my ways of Fury, I respecc’d for the awesome deal of 15g last night. I didn’t really get a chance to try it out yet, because I went directly to an AB match… you can guess how that turned out.

Newly-minted 70s in BGs with a re-visited spec do not fare well with epic’d out warlords. I died 6 times and only got 35 honor kills and one Mark of Honor for our 2000/930 loss. It was pitiful. It took 12 of us to re-take the Stables… I don’t know what it is about Alliance and Horde in AB. I’ve played both, so I’m pretty sure most of them have. It just doesn’t make any sense at all that Alliance can’t get their act together.

Since I’m sure to get a lot of questions and feedback on my new spec, here it is for all to see, comment, and make fun of. I’m not a build shop master by any stretch of the imagination, so we’ll see how this goes when it counts.

I’m going to try to get into TK with a PuG tonight because it’s the second night in Kara for Team 1. Time to get some gear!

Key Fragment #1: Check

January 18, 2008 By Gitr 17 Comments

Last night, I was joined by my fellow warrior guildie, Alaron, for a PuG through SL for Gitr’s first key fragment. It was an unusually quiet night for the guild with only 4-5 of us on all evening, so I was thankful to have one comrade.

He was leader and explained the fights I had not experienced yet quite accurately and successfully. We didn’t wipe until our first attempts on each of the last two bosses, but alas, no tanking loot dropped.

I was neglegent in e-mailing myself the screenshots this morning because I simply fell asleep at my desk after I got out of the shower and my wife had to wake me up to go to work. Maybe staying up until 1:30 in SL had something to do with it…

We had a very durable group, which made it much nicer than constantly rezzing the squishies. We had Gitr at MT, Alaron as dps, a ret shammy, a holy pally, and a hunter of unknown spec. My final screenshot showed me taking 38% of the damage, if my memory serves me correctly. I was at 50% until the wipes began. I was dead for nearly the entire last fight when the Sonic Boom and The Bomb were in the same area and I had no idea what to do about that.

What last night did was really instill the confidence to tank for a raid that my recent (and historical for that matter) experiences with PuGs weren’t feeding me. When the group pays attention and has a vested interest in getting to the very end, it’s amazing how much better a run goes. I almost can’t remember the feeling of raiding with 39 others for a common purpose, but I’m halfway to experiencing Kara, which sounds like it’s totally PuGgable on Silvermoon at this point.

I’ve seen several guildies in Kara on non-raid nights, so what are the odds of getting in on a LFG request for Kara as a MT/OT? I’ve been included on the Team 2 Kara raid for Friday nights, so we’ll see if I get to play next Friday.