Lo-Quality WoW

Way back when, I sat down and forced myself to grind instances to upgrade my Hunter.  Now I find myself trying to do the same with my Warrior and it’s so painfull.  Part of it, is knowing that since I’m trying to upgrade both her Protection and Fury specs means twice the amount of items to upgrade.  And the other part is the fact that I’ve been running with groups with a good to great skill level and being put into PUGs where it’s obvious people are clueless, it just drives me nuts.

At least my Warrior is getting a pretty wide exposure to the various instances and I’m less bothered by missing things that I would be with my Hunter.  For instance, I got to run Gundrak again, and on this run we actually took out Eck the Fercious which got me the Heroic: Gundrak achievement.  When I first ran it and we skipped Eck, I didn’t feel like trying to argue for taking him on just for the achievement.

I did a Nexus run and it’s interesting to see that despite the fact that’s there’s a couple of ways to run the instance, almost everyone now does it by going after Grand Magus Telestra first.  I know when I first started going in there, occassionally we’d do Ormorok the Tree-Shaper or, even rarely, Anomalus first.   The only other note from that run was the fact that I managed to net the Knights of the Ebon Blade, 15 Exalted Reputations, and Looking for Many achievements.  The Ebon Blade rep was the most important, since it allowed me to upgrade to the Death-Inured Sabatons.

Schrödinger’s Cats again did not do an ICC raid but they did gather enough to do a Naxxramas run for the Raid weekly.  Okay, we had 9 and some of us had undergeared alts but enough mains came along that it balanced out.  We went in, killed Patchwerk, got my Make Quick Wek of Him (10 player) achievement, and got out.  I wouldn’t have minded doing a full run but people immediately began dropping back out and it just wasn’t worth it.

Then I got into a 25-man Vault of Archavon PUG.  Well, 21-man at first and considering how undergeared people were, that was a bad idea, Toravon the Ice Watcher wiped the floor with us.  We managed to fill up the last 4-slots, got people to focus on the frost orbs, and powered through it.  Okay, sorta powered since we still lost half the raid.

We also took out Koralon the Flame Watcher.  Nowadays, those are pretty much the only two people do since they both drop items that people can still use but I wouldn’t have minded the extra emblems for killing the other watchers.  I still got my 100 Dungeon & Raid Emblems achievement on that run though.

That was quickly followed up by a Utgarde Pinnacle and Violet Hold runs, both pretty standard runs and nothing sticks out from those runs.  Then an Oculus run that was a little dicey since I’m not sure the tank had done it before, or at least not as a tank.  Of course, the tank also dropped just as we got to Eregos.  Fortunatley, the replacement tank was alright with coming in just at the very end, and since we killed Eregos about 1 minute after the daily count reset, we also ended up with Emblems of Frost instead of the Emblems of Triumph we were expecting.  Didn’t realize it did that.

By this time, I felt I could pick up another piece of gear, this time spending some of those hard earned Emblems on a Spiked Battleguard Choker.  Actually, that’s been part of the difficulty as well.  To hold on to higher Emblems or traded them in for lower ones but gear that’s still better than what I got.  Hopefully I’ve struck a good balance but one can never be quite sure.

I got into another Drak’Tharon Keep run.  This one was interesting in that the healer was running a 6k gearscore while the Tank had a decent gs of around 4.2k, most of it came from iLevel 264 Bind of Equip gear.  That combination meant that the healer didn’t have to do much to pull aggro off the tank and since the tank was slow in picking them up, I sometimes had to do a quick Challenging Shout to clear the healer. 

Not that the healer needed it.  A couple times he ran ahead of the rest of us and we’d turn the corner to see him casually healing himself while surrounded by mobs.  I always joke to my guildmate about “tree-tanking” but I’ve never seen it before.

Although to be honest, I’m not sure our tank would have been able to hold aggro even if the healer had lesser gear.  I know I pulled aggro once through straight damage and so did the Warlock with us.  If anything, it’s a reminder that a high gearscore isn’t everything.

Next up was a Azjol-Nerub run.  Which was very run of the mill until the tank decides to sprint ahead of the rest of us and engage Anub’arak.  The rest of us had to rush but the healer of all people, didn’t make it into the engagement circle.  Which isn’t as bad as it seems because if you were close enough to the wall, he could still heal us and we could damage things he had kited to the wall as well.

Which of course, meant the tank kept pulling Anub around the ring for no good reason at all.  We wiped on that try and the tank apologized to us for “falling asleep at the w key”.  The second try went a lot better and we managed to eek out the Gotta Go! achievement.

Last stop on my weekend tour of Northrend’s instances was Forge of Souls.  That in itself was a surprise since WoW won’t let you into the instance until you have an “appropriate” gear level, which told me that I was improving my Warrior’s gear slowly but surely.

Of course, the fact that I’ve only been into the Forge of Souls twice with my Hunter, once in normal and once in heroic, meant I wasn’t exactly sure of the fights.  In this instance, the fact that I run Deadly Boss Mods is the only thing that kept me “informed” of the fight.  Then again, the first time DBM warned to “stop all dps”, I was the only one who did stop dps.  After that, I just powered through like everyone else did. 

Too bad it’s just a two-boss instance.  Even with just two, it took quite awhile to finish it up.  Either way, I got my The Forge of Souls and Heroic: The Forge of Souls achievements.  Even got to finally start the quest train that takes you through the last three 5-man instances. 

Not sure how long I can keep up the pace of 2-3 instances a night.  Not that most of them are especially long or difficult, it’s putting up with the occassional idiot that just wears on you.  And I probably should do a couple of runs as a tank, but whereas a bad dps just means the fight is longer, a bad tank can wipe a group and I’m very rusty as a tank.