Lo-Quality WoW

Apparently, quite a bit because we spent most of last night trying to get people to do the bite part of the Blood Queen fight correctly.  Everything else, the air phase, the shifting shadow, the blood link thingy, all worked.  (Well, except one air phase where I died but that was partially my fault.) 

More often than not, it was multiple people getting mind controlled because they didn’t get their bites off.  I know I was one of them.  I had moved next to my target, targeted them, then went to push my #1 to bite them when my targeting suddenly changed back to the Blood Queen.  And then I tried to switch back to my bite target but couldn’t find him.  Then I tried to find anyone I could bite but ran out of time.

And I know one of the other Hunter’s had a different problem when he was supposed to bite me.  Twice in a row, he was supposed to bite me but before it switched his action bar, I got hit by the shifting shadow and I was off to the races.  I think he found someone else to bite the first time, but I think he got mind controlled the second time. 

We did figure out that part of the problem was that when the blood link hit people, it would move raid symbols over to them.  Since we were using the raid symbols to figure out where out bite targets was, it made things very dicey.  It was also unnecessary since the three people affected had a big red beam connecting them to two other people so it was easy to tell when you had it and we all knew to run to the center for it.  Silly

Turns out that one of the assists had it on and we finally had to resort to removing raid assist from everyone and just counting on the raid leader to run things.  Except it really wasn’t our raid leader, but someone who had the add-on that did bite assignments.  Whatever worked.

We actually managed to run the Blood Queen down to 2% health before she wiped us out with the enrage.  This was actually a two-fold problem.  One was the fact that we almost always lost dps during the fight.  I think part of that problem was that we were missing my guildmate, who’s one of the best raid healers we know.  That and the healers didn’t quite have their coverage down correctly because they kept having to shift all over the place.

The dps problem was also enhanced by the fact that people would STOP DPSING while waiting to bite someone.  I mean it.  We got our whispered assignments 20 seconds prior to the bite having to go off.  I saw the person who was assigned to bite me move next to me.  That’s fine.  But they weren’t casting!  Not even doing the auto attack with their wand!  Nothing!  Nada!  Zilch!  So that person spent maybe 15 seconds doing nothing but standing by me waiting for the action bar to change. 

To put this in perspective, the Blood Queen has something like 59.4 million hp in 25-man normal.  We got her down to 2% which is a little under 1.2 million hp.  Anyone with the bite usually does at least 10,000 dps.  For 15 seconds, that’s 150,000 points of damage or about 12.5% of that total.  Since I’m one of the last bitten, let’s assume that person did the same thing for the previous bite target.  That’s 25% right there.  And he wasn’t the only one! 

Unfortunatley, being somewhat of an “outsider”, I can’t really say much about it.  My regular group would probably pay attention but not many of the others.  It was just frustrating to be so close and realizing why it was only “close” rather than “done”. 

So we finally gave up and went over to the Plagueworks.  Festergut was a chinese fire drill in all the worst ways.  We still got it done.  But it’s not good when the range dps all spread out, and then suddenly they say “group 3 on the left, group 4 on the right.”  Why isn’t that good?  Because most of group 3 had already setup on the right and vice versa with group 4! 

And as for the spores?  That was very confusing with people giving conflicting orders.  For instance, I got the spore and marked with a square.  I saw that all the spores were at range, so I ran in.  Half way there I heard “square come in” which was fine since that’s what I was doing.  Then I heard “no wait, cross come in” which meant I had to reverse and go back out.  Except the person with the cross heard the first command and had aborted his inward movement as well. 

And that’s pretty much how it went, spores running all over the place and conflicting orders.  I still have no idea how we didn’t end up wiping.  Somehow, we manged to eek out the kill, but I think we still lost quite a number of people.  Crazy.

Rotface wasn’t all that much better.  On the very first debuff, the person ran North while the off-tank was waiting South!   It took several seconds for them realize what was wrong and in the meantime the ooze came out and started bashing on that person.  Fortunately a healer ran over and single healed that person until they could get the ooze to the off-tank but it was totally unnecessary. 

That wasn’t quite the worst thing, we also had people standing in melee with the ooze on them, causing quite a bit of damage.  Another person d/c and I think he was standing almost directly under an ooze pipe when it turned on.  Again, we managed to get the kill but it was a lot uglier than it should have been.

We took a couple of shots at Putricide as well.  Here, the problem was primarily a focus fire issue but there were a few others.  For instance, the raid leader called for a halt of dps on Putricide when we were close to the transition phase, and to dps the ooze.  Well, I know three of the four Hunters attacked the ooze, three other ranged dps and one melee also switched, but that was it.  We had something like 17 people acting as dps and only 7 changed their target?

I know for the green ooze, despite the fact that Putricide was tanked mainly by his table, there were at least two instances when the ooze latched on to someone near the door, which is the opposite side of the room.  Nobody should have been there, and as a result, we could neither dps the ooze effectively or gather around that person to disperse the aoe damage. 

So naturally, that meant we lost people.  We were down at least 5 dps before we got to the third phase, which is just sloppy.  The first try we wiped quickly because of stuff like that.  The other try we actually got him down to 1% but that was more due to tank’s toughness more than anything else.  I know I was one of the last to die but all the healers were very dead by then and one health potion kept me up for only an extra second or two. 

We stopped at that point.  Again, it was nice to be working on 25-man content but it was annoying to get so close and get denied because of very correctable things.  It’s supposed to switch back to the 10-man teams tonight but I know we’re going to be short-handed because a few of our key people aren’t going to be around this weekend.  So there’s a good chance it’ll be called off.  I actually wouldn’t mind, I could probably use a few days off.