Lo-Quality WoW

After a couple of false starts, we finally had a chance to go back in to Icecrown Citadel 10-man.  We’re sort of at an odd place at the moment.  We’re skilled and geared enough that normal mode for the earlier bosses is too easy, but not geared or skilled enough to take on heroic mode on a regular basis.

So we’ve been trying to get through the early stuff on heroic mode whenever we can.  Marrowgar has been a big bugga-boo for us for some reason.  We’re fine right up to his first whirlwind set.  Then we usually lose two or three people to a combination of the coldflame, the spikes and Marrowgar himself.  Then it just becomes a cascade effect until we wipe. 

Now we have downed him before, so I get the feeling it’s partially a luck thing.  All it takes is one wrong person spiked  or spiked and then having Marrowgar dance on top of him, we just can’t handle it.  For instance, I got hit by a coldflame, and before I could recover, Marrowgar started spinning on my position.  As I tried to get out of there, he poked me with a spike.  The combination did me in before the healers could react.

Eventually we gave up and just took him out on normal mode.  It was back to Heroic mode for Deathwhisper though and that we can do.  Had a shaky start though, when I guess we accidentally left an add up early and that one extra add was enough to throw our whole tactic off.  Second time went off without a hitch and I managed to snag the Handgrips of Frost and Steel.  It was an upgrade but would require fine tuning the rest of my gear.

The gunship battle on heroic mode is cake at this point.  Funny how I remember the very first time we did that battle and had absolutely no clue what we were doing.

Which of course brought us to Deathbringer Saurfang.  This time, we got rather experimental.  We tried it with two healers, which meant the Blood Beasts went down faster but as soon as marks started popping up, we lost it.  With three healers, we lasted longer once marks appeared but we’d wipe at the frenzy point.  We tried splitting fire on the Blood Beasts but that usually meant us Hunter’s at some point kiting out of range of our healers or having trouble getting back in to position to dps Saurfang because of the slow debuff.  

This one I think is being caused by gear and some coordination issues.  We need to whittle Saurfang down a little faster and I think we need to do the split dps on the Blood Beasts.  However, if we’re splitting our dps, then timing becomes a factor at times and knowing when to do what, which doesn’t always work, especially towards the end of the night. 

We eventually went back to normal mode just so we could get past him.  Again, the difference between normal and heroic mode is just staggering.  We called it a night at that point, we were just too tired from all the wiping. 

The next night after we started with heroic Blood Prince Council.  Which was a complete disaster.  I’m still not even 100% sure why we started with them in the first place.  We just couldn’t get our coordination down.  We wiped several times before finally giving up and moving over to Rotface.

Where we wiped some more.  Heroic Rotface always feels easier to me but something was hinky for us.  For instance, on one occassion, the vile gas hit the middle of melee causing the wipe.  And that was with both Hunters and our off-tank at range.  The only thing I can think of is somehow one of us drifted in too close.  I think we moved a caster dps to range to help out but since that person wasn’t used to being at range for that fight, he died and we ran into problems from there.  We did eventually take him down but it was a long night and we decided to end it right here.  It just wasn’t our night.

And neither was the next night, although for entirely different reasons.  Partically everyone in the group was experiencing 1k+ latency.  (Mine howevered at 4k the whole night.)  Considering we had people in Hawaii, Japan, Australia and West Coast US on, we knew it was pretty much on the server end.  We didn’t even attempt it with that amount of latency.  We’re not that insane.

The night after that, we started with Festergut on heroic mode.  In this case, it was a combination of some newer fill-ins with lower dps numbers and a non-regular off-tank that did us in.  We couldn’t beat the enrage timer and half the time we’d lose the off-tank midway through the fight anyway. 

Instead of stalling out here, we just switched to normal and romped over him so we could get to Putricide.  Oddly enough, this one went better.  Granted it was in normal mode but still.  We wiped the first time because our off-tank, who was controlling the abomination, had UI issues.  Basically when he was in the abomination, none of the action buttons would show up!  We switched the tanks around and wiped again, although in this case it was because a healer d/c in the middle of the fight and we had been two-healing it.  Third time was the charm and we took Putricide down promptly.

Then we went back to Blood Prince Council.  This fight was on normal but ended up being pretty ugly all the same.  Once again, because we didn’ t have one of our “usual” off-tanks, we had one of our other guys use his alt for it.  Which hurt us in two ways.  One was that his main, a shadow Priest, is usually our top dps.    Two was that he had a slightly harder time getting proper aggro at times.  Not sure if it was a technique or gear thing, but it happened quite a bit.

I think we finally took them down with a bit of luck, but it was still ugly.  I know two kinetic bombs went off, usually dealt with by us Hunters, but I couldn’t even see them!  One, judging from where the aoe bolts came from, did not show up once it began to drop.  Fortunately, our healers covered us but it still pissed me off all the same.

Blood Queen was chaotic, but that was partially because our inexperience for some of our people and a misconfigured add-on.  We were again using the add-on to dictate who bit who, but since it was misconfigured, it told our bitten player to bite a tank!  And because that player hadn’t done that fight before, he didn’t realize that there was something wrong with that instructions. 

And actually, he even ended up being the first bite by accident.  Based on threat, usually it’s the two tanks on top, then us Hunters, then him.  But our off-tank had a little problem with his threat generation, which meant that both Hunters slipped to 2nd and 3rd.  Except we pushed into 1st and 2nd, mainly due to the fact that you can go about 120% threat before pulling aggro off the tank and we just eclipsed him barely. 

Which left the main tank as third on the threat meter.  Except I think the Blood Queen won’t bite someone who has aggro.  And while he was third, he still had aggro because both of us Hunter’s were still below 120% of his threat.  Which meant the fourth person, our dps warrior, got the bite.  Which led to the hilarity of him biting the main tank!

Okay, maybe not funny at the time but is on reflection.  Next time, we lost people because of some odd bad luck and again inexperience.  We lost some people when one of the newer people didn’t know what to do with the Pact of the Darkfallen on him.  And I died because when she feared us, it sent me directly into the shroud of shadows areas.  It wasn’t enough to kill me, but it took me down enough that the bloodbolt took me out. 

Then the worst thing happened to me, I disconnected.  And couldn’t get on via my WoW client although I could hear everyone in vent.  I eventually had to reboot my router to get me back online and they went to an entire fight and wipe, without me. 

Fortunately, since I’m generally a dependable regular, they realized it wasn’t something I did on purpose.  I think we wiped one more time after that, because we lost a healer somehow.  The very last time, I managed to get the Vampiric Bite, which meant I saw all sorts of nice pretty, huge damage numbers roll in.  And I was able to time my bites so that we didn’t need to do the bites during the air phase.  Which meant in short order, we had 4 dps with the Essence of the Blood Queen and she went down fast and hard.

Which is where we called it again.  Just too tired to even attempt Dreamwalker.  So next will be a couple of nights of the 25-man runs, which I may or may not be invited to, and then back to the 10-man. 

In the meantime, back to me and my new gloves.  It was an upgrade, but it also broke my tier set bonus.  So I had to replace my chest piece with the Ahn’kahar Blood Hunter’s Tunic to keep the set bonus.  Which also, unfortunately, cost me some points in hit and on dps.  Which then meant I had to regem a few items to get my hit adjustment back up to 8%.  Crazy.