Lo-Quality WoW

Every so often, I just have one of those nights. Got invited to a 10-man Naxx that fell apart because we were short a healer. Got invited to a Heroic Nexus, no healer. Heroic Drak’Tharon? No healer in sight. Another Heroic Nexus, again no healer. Heroic Old Kingdom? You mean your hunter’s not a healer? 10-man OS, oh but we need a healer or two. On Draenor, in BC, it was tanks that tend to go missing. I think with the addition of Death Knights and the reworking of tank classes in general, tanks became easier to grab and now it’s the healers turn.

So I spent most of the evening bumming around Elwynn Forests, trying to do old quests to try and get the Lorekeeper achievement. Nothing like walking in to Fargodeep Mine with a lvl 80 character. Strangely enough, I keep running into lvl 70-ish Blood Elves. But since they didn’t have their flags on and I didn’t hear any screams on the LocalDefense channel, I didn’t worry about it. Generally if there’s a world event on like Lunar Festival that requires you to venture into opponent territory, I don’t mind. If I see you walk towards a town and start slaughtering guards and townsfolk, then I tend to try to fill you full of holes.

But surprise, surprise, I get an Utgarde Pinnacle invite. So it’s off to the last place I haven’t been into in Heroic. Oddly enough, I have been there a couple of times on normal, so I’m familiar with the place in general. It was actually three people from a guild and they picked up me and another to fill the slots. It goes well until the first boss and we try for the The Incredible Hulk achievement. Since I wasn’t familiar with the fight to get that achievement, I actually screwed up the first try and we wipe. They were nice enough not too boot me and we try again. This time, I did my job but I think the tank got hit too hard and we wipe again. Fortunately, instead of trying a third time, they said “heck with it, we’ll do this the regular way”. Considering I’ve been in groups that were just dead set on getting an achievement no matter how many times we wipe, it was very refreshing. And naturally we clean Svala’s clock. Also, since we didn’t have a disenchanter around, we decided we would just roll greed on everything. That little fact becomes important in a little bit.

Gortok goes down easily. Then we get to Skadi and we do the alternate strategy of gathering harpoons before doing the event for real. Fortunately, I knew about that strategy, I just never tried it before. Our Death Knight gathers the harpoons, we rush in, and sure enough Skadi goes down. And to ice the cake, the Lodi Dodi We Loves the Skadi and My Girl Loves to Skadi All the Time achievements ping. I think “Cool!”. Then we roll for the drop and suddenly I find myself with the Greedy achievement as well. Definitely wasn’t expecting that, although I wish it was for something I actually wanted.

And it’s off to King Ymiron, with a brief stop to say “hi” to the Elder. Again, the fight goes will well and then suddenly I see my Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle and Northrend Dungeon Hero achievements. 5 achievements from one instance? That’s a pretty nice set.

But once again, lack of healers hampers me. Heroic Occulus, just need a healer! Heroic Violet Hold, bring a healer and we’ll take you. So I bum back to Elwynn Forest to take out groups of kobolds with exploding traps. Then I get an invite to Utgarde Keep. I actually have enough time to fly to Menethil Harbor, catch the boat and start flying to UK before I get the summons. So myself, a MM hunter, a shaman and priest join up with a warrior and we plunge ahead.

The first set of mobs seems a bit off and the battle seems to take forever. I also seemed to manage to pull aggro a couple of times, even with extensive feign death and misdirection usage. I check my dps and I’m hitting around 1850, a little low for some reason but still acceptable. The MM is hitting around 1400, but the tank is at 700 dps and I don’t even see the shaman or priest. Before I say anything, the priest says “did you grab two healers?” “Yeah!” replies the warrior. What?!? But the priest is nice enough not to call him an idiot and simply says “I guess I’ll dps then.”

Now a holy priest isn’t exactly a dps class. Shadow priest or discipline is. But she’s game, so we go on. And I start noticing a disturbing habit. Both myself and the other hunter have seemed to picked up a habit of pulling aggro off the tank. And it’s simple mob pulls, which starts to worry me. Suddenly, my until recently rusty trapping skills start coming into play. The sad part is that I’ve atrophied so much that the MM hunter is trapping better than me! Sigh. But we’re killing stuff and the healer is still alive, so everything is still good. Although I’m getting suspicious of our tank since he calls for us to “mana up” before the last pull before the boss. Normally you do that after the pull but before the boss itself. Okay maybe he’s being overly cautious but it still seems odd.

We take on Prince Keleseth and basically the skeleton adds run rampant throughout the fight. Fortunately the MM and I do a good job of keeping them off the healer as well as being the primary people cracking people out of frost tombs. In the past, I usually see about three frost tombs but this fight lasts long enough for me to see at least ten, twice where I was the recipient, three times for the other hunter and the other five spread among the other three. I glance at my meters and while the hunters and the tank are holding steady on dps, the priest is only adding about 500 dps to the total. As you know, I get nervous when a dps is doing less dps than the tank, but she’s a holy priest as I said and I can forgive the low dps. The tank’s dps does bother me though. My warrior does about 800dps while tanking instances and she’s only lvl 72. Most tanks I go with hover around the 1k point. But I push my doubts down and we go on.

Skarvald and Dalronn come up next, after a brief talk with the Elder in the place, and again we mana up in the pull before them. We charge in and again, it’s a long, long fight. Other times, I barely even noticed the skeleton adds that show but in this case, there’s several of them running around while the MM and myself and busy dropping snake traps and peeling them off the healer, all while still slapping the two bosses. Thank goodness we’re hunters, which means we also have our pets running around as well. But it becomes a very chaotic fight, which we somehow get through with the tank saying “perfect” at the end. Or tried to. He actually said “prefect”, but I’m guessing he wasn’t talking about a magistrate of some sort. Somehow, a battle that has adds, bosses, characters and pets running willy nilly in the room doesn’t seem “perfect” to me but nobody asked my opinion.

We keep fighting on, pulling aggro off the tank like we were begging for it. Again, we mana up just before the last mob group, which seems particularly silly before Ingvar the Plunderer. He’s quite far away and there’s no chance we could accidentally pull him in the battle. But we mana up anyways, smash the mobs, and go on to kick Ingvar’s butt. The fight is pretty simple, although very long again and I screwed up by standing close enough to eat a Smash.

Now that we’re over, I leave and start looking through my logs. Again, dps was pretty steady with myself at 1850 dps, the MM at 1450 dps, the tank at 700 and the priest at 500. I did 41.2% of the total damage, the MM accounting for 29.7%. Our two hunters accounted for almost 70% of the damage? Normally, I do anywhere between 23-32% of the total damage. So my damage totals seemed unusually high and the MM’s about what I expect. Also, on that last fight I had paid attention and it was several seconds before I saw the first sunder armor on the boss. That bothers me, since I usually have two or three in the first few seconds of a fight. I checked and the tank was actually decently geared, but I got the impression that he rarely or is just recent to the tanking game. Damage and threat should have been much higher, we shouldn’t have pulled the aggro so easily.

So, since the server is shutting down, I just sigh and head back to Dalaran where I begin cleaning my bags. Where I noticed something that made that UK run even more ridiculous. I had just done a complete heroic instance without my trusty pointy stick, the mighty Whale-Stick Harpoon equipped. I had taken it off in Elwynn Forest and never put it back on. I know it was on during the UP run because I actually had my fishing pole equipped until someone commented on it. I just couldn’t believe that I had handicapped myself of 69 agility, 185 ap and 40 hit rating and I still topped the damage and dps charts and did 41.2% of the total damage? If the server hadn’t been shutting down, I probably would have knocked myself unconscious at that point from the absurdity of that run!