Lo-Quality WoW

Patch days suck.  They always causing issues and more than likely have hit one or more of your characters with a nerf bat.  Worst, is when a new expansion comes out.  When Burning Crusade came out, everyone was in the outlands and it took forever just to complete the first 3 quests because hundreads of other players are all trying to kill the same things you are.  Between the two are upgrade days.

Sometimes it’s hardware, sometimes it’s just code.  But Blizzard is upgrading something on your server that means you won’t be able to play.  Sometimes for a couple of days.  Or your realm is back up but they take down the authentication systems for some damn reason.  Okay, it’s one thing when everyone is down but when you look on the realm status page and see that your realm is down but there’s dozens of other realms up with the nice green colored status, you just want to shave your cat.

So for a few days I couldn’t play WoW.  Got in some extra time on my xbox 360 but it’s not the same.  And since everyone on the server was down, everything got pushed back.  For instance, normally on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Palidrons do their 25-man raid while I’m only on the 10-man team, which raids from Thursday to Monday.  Well, those days when we have people for it that is.  So I figured with the server being inaccessible Tuesday, things would get pushed back.

Which it did, except for some reason, they were short of people and my guildmate and I got to fill in on their 25-man Icecrown Citadel run.    Now for awhile the Agency had been doing 25-man runs but they were still few and far between.  When the Cats split off, there just wasn’t enough people for the 25-man run.  Then when the Cats merged with Palidrons, I knew the Palidrons was a pretty sizeable group so again, I was outside looking in.

Except this week.  Part of it may have been because my 10-man team raid leader seemed in charge this time.  Even being short a few people, they might not have invited us if he wasn’t in charge.  Then again, my guildmate is one of their favorite healers while I’m dps, and let’s face it, dps is generally plentiful. 

Either way, I had expected a few days off of raiding so I could do some dailies and maybe some fishing.  Then I get the invite.  As if I was going to turn down a chance to run ICC 25-man.  So I packed my gear and went in.

Surprisingly, there were only three of us Hunters in the group.  Seven or eight Paladins though.  And considering the other two were Marksmen Hunters, I knew I’d have to do my best not to suck.  Personally, I would be happy to be in the top 10 on the dps meters, especially since it seemed that the average gearscore was slightly above mine.

Fortunately, this was a non-heroic run.  And as I said, I’d been on several Agency 25-man runs so I knew the fights.  Marrowgar was pretty simple, especially with the dps numbers some people were putting out.  In fact it was high enough for me to get the Boned (25 player) achievement.  \

Deathwhisper was also pretty straightforward.  Agency runs would split the group in roughly half to deal with adds on each side.  Hunters usually stayed in the middle to dps stuff in the back and on either side.  For the Palidrons, it was just tanks designated to left, right or back and range on one side, melee on the other.  Which probably wasn’t the most efficient but still ended up working quite well. 

The gunship battle is always a fun relaxing fight.  About the only hiccup we had was that the boarding party was a little underpowered during the “Below zero” phase and took awhile to take down the battlemage.  I think that’s because they only explicitedly assigned the melee dps to the boarding party.  I know that myself and at least a mage jumped over on each subsequent phases and the battlemage seemed to go down a lot faster.

Then came Deathbringer.  This time I ended up siding on the right side, next to Rodman.  Since I was the pickup Hunter, I figured I’d let the two “regular” Hunters have the end side and instead of my usual left, I figured running on the right side next to Rodman would work best since I’ve raided with him quite a bit so the chances of us doing something weird to each other was minimal. 

Not sure how other’s do it, but on the 25-man runs you usually have at least 2 Hunters and they take up either far end.  A third or fourth Hunter will be inside of them and cover the front of the dias with their Frost Trap.  In this case, the “inside” Hunter was just myself which meant I had to run forward and drop my trap directly in front of the dias.  It also meant I had to minimize my time within range of others and hope that people hadn’t shifted so much that I still could find a decent spot to stop and resume my dps from without getting within the range of other players.

Fortunately, it worked out.  On less experienced groups, or even some experienced ones, people will move about when they shouldn’t, even after you’ve been perfectly place.  And for that fight, you keep an eye on your range check and if you see anyone drift into it, you’re natural inclination is to move away and try to get clear.  In this case, people knew that if a Hunter suddenly was too close, that he was just dropping traps and would get out of there as soon as he could, so they knew they didn’t need to move. 

Then we were inside the Upper Spire and instead of starting in on Festergut and Rotface, it was decided to take on the Blood Prince Council.  I never did that before on 25-man, so I knew it would be interesting especially since 25 players meant it was that much harder not to bunch up at the wrong place. 

Now with three Hunters, the Kinetic Bombs  shouldn’t have been a problem.  That is, if you’re three Hunters are alive.  On our first try, I know at some point one of the other Hunters had died.  And I knew my pet was on one Kinetic Bomb, I had another next to me and then I spied one across the room and didn’t see anyone after it.  It wasn’t why we wiped but it was still annoying.

Fortunately a few of the other pointed out that while yes, it’s the Hunters who deal with the Kinetic Bombs, if any Hunter dies, other people need to take up the slack.  The Kinetic Bomb job sounds simple but it’s not really.  You have to react to all the various attacks and abilities of the Council, dps the correct council member, and still be able to find the new Kinetic bomb in what is a pretty sizeable room. 

At least I have a slight “trick” for it.  There’s no really good way for the Hunters to setup and go “okay, you get the first one, I’ll get the next, you get the third.”  For one reason, the new bomb could be coming down across the room from you.  Another is that the bomb’s have a certain about of hit points themselves.  And depending on the pet or Hunter, the second bomb might get destroyed before the first one and that would just jam up the order again.  So what I do is put my pet on passive and explicitedly have it attack a bomb.  That way if I suddenly see my pet following me, I know there’s a Kinetic bomb out there, somewhere, with my name on it. 

Either way, we got it done on the second try.  Then it was on to the Blood Queen herself.  Now the 10-man is pretty chaotic, the 25-man is worst.  Especially since it seemed like we had people who hadn’t even done it on 10-man.  And unlike the Blood Council, the Blood Queen’s room is a pretty small area to squeeze 25 characters in to and still keep certain minimum differences from each other. 

So we wipe.  And wipe.  And wipe.  Some of it is stupid, like when people did not group up when they had the Pact of the Darkfallen on them.  Or when we were in the middle of the Twilight Bloodbolt attack, people were still running around and more often than not, would run too close to someone who had safely found a spot by themself and had wisely stayed put and got them both killed.

At least twice it was because the vampire player didn’t bite anyone else and got mind controlled!  Now someone had an addon that helped identify who should bite whom.  The problem was, people got fixated on it and spent too long trying to find their assigned target instead of just turning around and biting the nearest dps they could find.

Another wipe was caused then the one person with the vampire bite DIED!  So we were without the fun buff the bite provides and it’s next to impossible to dps high enough to compensate.  It was just chaos.  And considering how tired we were, it was wisely called off before the wipes really started getting ridiculous.

The next night found me back on the 25-man team.  This time we went straight for Festergut and Rotface.  I know as the Agency we never got passed either on 25-man, although we did try.  We just couldn’t get the coordination down. 

Rotface was first and despite the fact that several times we ended up with a slime in the raid, we somehow persevered.  Personally, I think it was some excellent healing going on that helped us more than anything else.  Still a bit chaotic but very doable.

For Festergut, they split the range by groups which put me on the left side start instead of my normal right side.  Still, I went with the flow and adjusted.  And I paid attention.  I noticed that whenever there were too many spores in the melee or in range, it was the skull marked player who was told to move.  So the time I got marked with a spore, a quick glance showed that all the spores were among the ranged and since I had the skull marking, I was already sprinting for the melee before anyone could say anything.

So Festergut goes down and among the drops is Distant Land which got me drooling.  This night only had myself and Rodman as Hunters and I already knew he had that staff but there were also few druids in the group.  And I figured that since this was my first 25-man run, I didn’t have any dkp with them and that I was esentially a stand-in.  Either way, I still rolled for it, figuring “why the hell not?”

And nobody else wanted it!  But even then, as I said, they might have chosen to still vendor or disenchant it rather than giving it to a stand-in, which I’ve had groups do to me before.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the message saying I’d gotten it.  Yay!  I finally got a replacement stick!

Putricide however was wipe after wipe.  Part of it was a tanking issue, where the tank kept taking him to the wrong side of the room.  And when he did tank him on the correct side, he sometime would still keep him moving around which made it hard for the melee dps to set themselves in the right position to attack.  Worst was when he would drag Putricide, and our melee dps, away from the adds!

The rest of it was a purely dps issue.  People just weren’t switching to the adds fast enough or when they were being pursued, wouldn’t run away correctly or would run themselves into a corner.  It was just a big mess.

So after a few wipes, it was still early enough that we attempted Dreamwalker.  Now this was a very confusing fight since we now had four portals for stuff to come out of.  Here we wiped a few more times but I know for myself, part of it was trying to figure out which was “SW” vs “NE” while running around and doing dps on either side.  We actually got her to 98% healed on the first try but got overwhelmed.

I think it was on our fourth try that we actually succeeded, which was good considering how late it was getting.  All in all, some good solid runs, taking on bosses in 25-man mode that I hadn’t got to before.  And more importantly, despite not being the “correct” Hunter raid spec and also having a slightly lower gearscore, I was still able to maintain a relatively high dps ranking.  Even better on the damage done ranking.

So that’s it.  Tonight we should be shifting back to the 10-man runs.  Not sure we they were able to lock the instance or if we’ll have to start from scratch again.  I’m good for it either way.  Just hope I can stay awake for it.