Lo-Quality WoW

So I log on at my normal time to suddenly see a patch being loaded.  Uh oh, that’s usually never a good thing.  Except it’s primarily a null-effect patch.  What do I mean?  The big thing it adds is the Ruby Sanctum, which isn’t available for North America!  The vote kick feature has been changed, but I rarely use it.  The chat frames are different, but I haven’t done anything with it.  And I can now add friends based off their battle.net accounts, which I don’t know.  So pretty much the patch did nothing to me except cause a few errors in several of my addons!

Anyway, I had mainly logged on to do a quick set of dailies before going to play one of the new Xbox 360 games I picked up when I got an invite to the Palidrons 25-man raid.  I didn’t think they were short handed but what the heck, I don’t mind another set of raids.

For the most part, the lower spire items were easy.  The main excitement happened when we pulled two groups and somehow activated two Deathbound Wards at the same time.  As one guy said “this was a gear check on your video card!” 

Marrowgar was simple, especially with practically everyone being ranged dps.  There were four of us Hunters and nobody stayed on a spike for long.  Deathwhisper was also pretty straightforward.  Melee on the left, ranged dps on the right and with additional dps on anyone coming from the back.  Gunship was also simple, and I sort of wonder why we didn’t attempt it on heroic.  I actually had gone to get a drink when they made assignments so I wasn’t sure if I was on the boarding part or not, but the gunship went down with no casualties, so it was all good.

Saurfang was mainly notable in that for some reason, nobody would let me make room near the front of the room.  I was actually in the back row.  So when I had to place my Frost Trap, I had to run all the way forward, drop the trap then use Disengage to help me get back into position as quickly as possible.  Lots of running back and forth. 

And actually, there were a couple of drops that I could have rolled on but I didn’t because I wasn’t even sure I had DKP.  I know a couple of previous guilds I’ve run with refused to allocate DKP for non-guild members.  I shouldn’t have worried.  I checked the Palidrons DKP page and found I had DKP points.  Now I wished I had rolled on an item or two!

Inside, we again went for the Crimson Hall.  With four Hunters, Kinetic Bomb should have been easy.  Except we found out that somehow the Kinetic Bomb can be spawned outside the room, where we can’t reach it.  And on one occassion, my pet had been keeping a Kinetic Bomb in the air for awhile, when suddenly the bomb managed to go off.  All I can think of is that I had some sort of lag at that point.  We didn’t lose anyone to it, but it was embarrassing nonetheless.

Then we took on the Blood Queen.  That’s where it got ugly.  For one thing, it’s a small room to try and distance people out during the bloodbolt whirl.  That and the healers are constantly running around during it to try and make sure everyone is healed.  We eventually did get that part down but a couple of times I just stood still and had to hope that the healer running past me tossed a heal my way while he did it.

Where we really got messed up was from the vampire bites.  Fortunately, whomever had the addon for it had set the warning 20 seconds ahead and it would also place raid markings on people to make it easier to find the person you’re supposed to bite.  But we still messed up! 

Actually, it happened to one of the other Hunters.  Somehow he couldn’t find his target, got mind controlled, and managed to kill off three or four players before we could take him out!  The second time it happened, he said it was because his whisper came after the raid warning so he didn’t have the 20 seconds.  He got mind controlled again and only managed to take out one person, which was an improvement, all things considering.

We did get pretty close to downing the Blood Queen.  The last try we got her down to about 15% but when we lost someone to mind control, it was enough to make us miss the enrage timer.  We actually have the gear and people to it, we just can’t let anyone get mind controlled and I really have no idea of a good way to fix the problem other than practice. 

Tonight we’ll see if they keep me along.  I hope they do, I like getting the practice on the 25-man.  And I think it says something that while I’m usually around 12th on the pure dps numbers, I’m usually in the top 5 of total damage dealt.  And considering that after my last respec, I have very little multi-target or aoe attacks, means I’m not artifically inflating my numbers.  I still hope that during the next patch tweak, they do something to the Survivial build to edge us closer to the Marksman builds.  I’m very close in gearscore to other Hunters but I’m still pulling maybe 1k less dps when you do a comparisson.  I’ll have to research it more.  Maybe I’m just not playing my Hunter correctly.