Lo-Quality WoW

It’s the Lunar Festival and I’m still taking medication! Now Northrend gets a bunch of Elders, of which an annoying number are in instances, which means people who probably don’t do many instances are doing them and others who sort of know what’s going on but really don’t are out there as well. So Achievements, a couple of old quests, and a handful of instances. Not bad for being out of commission for a few days.

So, let’s start with the Lunar Festival. This is my third year and is actually one of the World Events I always try to do regardless. 75 rep to Alliance is nothing to sneeze at for talking to an Elder. My first year, I did practically all of them except the horde cities and the instances. Last year I did the instances. This year, I finally got the horde city Elders. Then I looked through my list and found that I had apparently missed an Elder in Western Plaguelands. It wasn’t even the Scholomance one but the one just off the road. How the heck I missed her the past two years, I’ll never know.

This was also the first year I did Omen. In past years, either the Raids were filled or I went there and I was the only clown around. This time, a Raid formed as I was in the area, so I joined. So we start off and quickly wipe. The main tank died very fast and somehow I kept pulling Omen. I managed to kite him to the graveyard but I still died. Then we realized that we had no healers! No wonder the MT died. And I took a look at my recount stats. I was doing only about 1400 dps but it’s hard to go full bore if I’m being stomped on. Then I realized, despite other lvl 80 dps classes, I was the only one in the 1K+ area. All the rest were in the 500-600 dps area. No wonder I kept pulling Omen like I had dog kibble in my pockets! The group manages to grab some healers and we’re off again. Again, I top the dps totals but at least it’s closer to my normal 2k dps and the others are above 1k, which is good since 5 Mil hp takes awhile to whittle down. Omen goes down and I look at my totals. I and another hunter topped the damage lists and between the two of us, we took off 1.5 Mil hp off Omen. The two of us kept switching off for top spot and I know I had to switch into Viper twice to get mana, but I think I edged her out by maybe 4000 damage at the end. Glad I don’t have to do that anymore…

Since I was already in the “Classic” areas, I started searching for a completing quests for the Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms achievement. Between 4 high level characters and numerous alts, it’s hard to remember which character has done which quests before so I spend a lot of time riding to various places with the low-level quests tracking on. In the meantime, I’m also on the Looking For Group channel, hoping to join in on the instances for the Elders of Northrend achievement.

And that’s how I find myself doing a heroic Gundrak. Oddly enough, I’ve only been there once before and that was on normal. We go in and on the very first boss, we wipe. Okay, back in and try again. This time, the healer and I are standing up the ramps while the three melee are down below. Fine, except when numerous snakes break past those three and come rushing up to eat our healer. I’ve sort of gotten used to being the “healer guard” since I tend to be at extreme range. And for the most part, I’m good at it and the healer can be assured I have a scatter shot and a freezing or other trap primed to keep stuff off of them. Except when there’s more than one or two mobs running through to him. And since I’m not actually an aoe machine, it takes me awhile to get them off the healer. Where we run into the problem that it took my guild healer awhile to get over. Namely the “panic” flight. Where the healer is getting hit and thus takes off running to avoid the mobs. The thing is, if it’s a hunter who’s trying to pull the mobs off you, YOU DON’T RUN TOWARDS HIM! It puts me into melee and it makes it a whole lot harder for me to pull things off you. So naturally, the healer goes down and I get blamed. Sigh. Then the MT says we’ll pull the boss into the second bosses room and do it from there. Of course that means we need to kill the second boss, which was rather easy. Then the MT goes “okay, the way we’ll do this is…oh damn, I need to go.” And then he pops out of the group! Way to leave people hanging!

Fortunately the healer has another tank in his pocket and we finally kill the first boss and I get the handy-dandy Snakes. Why’d It Have To Be Snakes? achievement. We continue to the third boss and hand him his head. Then one of our dps runs off while the rest of us head towards the heroic-only boss Eck and the Elder in the instance. “LOL, you guys are taking the long way?” “What long way? We’re going to kill the heroic-only boss!” “There’s a heroic-only boss?” Some people need to pay attention better. Fortunately Eck goes down, although I had to retime my MD’s on him when he jumped, we talked to the Elder and then took on the last boss. He goes bye-bye and I get my Heroic: Gundrak achievement. One crazy Elder down, more to go!

Next I get into a Drak’Tharon Keep instance. This one was pretty standard although King Dred turned out to be exceptionally difficult for some reason. We wiped the first time. On the second time, the MT went down and fortunately the mage and I were able to bounce each other’s aggro long enough until Mudgie grabbed a hold of him. Still was quite touch and go there for a while. But watching a huge dinosaur run between a hunter and a mage was kinda funny actually. Either way, we pull through and I cross another Elder off my list.

Then there’s a Azjol-Nerub run. Which takes awhile to start since the instance was full, late on a Sunday night of all things! But we get in and wipe because the little miniboss managed to disorient the healer at a very bad time. Second try gets us through where we run to Hadronox, which turns out to be bugged since the portals never get sealed. Again, wipe but the second try is bug free and we blow through. On to Anub’arak, where one of the dps suddenly decides to hold a conversation in the middle of the fight! “So where’s the elder in here?” “We passed it already.” “Well, can we delay breaking up the group until I go talk to him?” “Sure.” “So where is he exactly?” “We’re kinda in the middle of something!” WIPE! It’s not a hard fight but if you’re busy typing, you’re probably not paying attention to the battle. At least one more Elder was found.

At that point, I was going to call it a night despite the fact that I was less than 300 rep to getting to Exalted with Wyrmrest Accord. That’s when a guildmate needed another dps for a Heroic Violet Hold. No Elder but I might as well help a buddy out. It goes well until we hit the first boss, which turns out to be Moragg. The MT starts yelling “stop attacking when he flashes!” What he meant was that when he does an optik-link to someone, stop attacking since it boosts the link. Except, every time I fight Moragg, we usually just burn through, which is what everyone except the MT does. As long as the healer keeps an eye on the person with the link, everything is cool. But the MT keeps yelling at us to stop (which is actually a little hard to do as a hunter) and yet we blast through him, no problem. Next boss turns out to be Zuramat and the immediately the MT starts moaning about making sure we’re activating the red switches. Except I’ve only used that on the Ichoron fight. For Zuramat, you just make sure whomever gets the phase debuff takes out the sentries. Since I ended up getting the debuff the first two times, one explosive shot is usually enough to take them out no problem. Then on wave 16, we have our screw up. The healer ran down to the bottom to reset for the next portal, which is the normal practice. The tank, seeing the portal was just next to the one we just closed, ran straight for it. Now normally, either the tank notices he has no healer and holds off or the healer notices the tank charging in and runs forward. Didn’t happen and we wipe. So there’s the blame game going and I can tell from my tracker that there’s a whole bunch of mobs banging on the barrier. They burst through and instead of the instance reseting, we find ourselves staring at Cyanigosa. Well, we finish buffing up and then take the big dragon. We finish and I go staggering off, fresh with the achievement The Wyrmrest Accord and consequentially the Northrend Vanguard achievement as well.

And that would be the end of it except I noticed I had 81 emblem of heroism which meant I could go get the Heroes’ Cryptstalker Tunic! So I rush off, buy the chestpiece, get enchants and gems, put it on…and find out it doesn’t quite balance out the Polished Regimental Hauberk it was replacing. I was losing 20 points in hit rating and maybe .30% chance in crit in exchange for 7 more AP and .03 more speed. Ugh! So, into the bank it goes until I get my hands on another piece of armor and then we’ll see if the 5% extra pet damage makes it worth it.

So, a new chest piece I won’t wear, something like 12 achievements, and various odds and ends. Busy night.