Lo-Quality WoW

Considering I spent most of the past few days getting mad at what other people were doing, I felt I needed to top it by getting mad at myself.  I don’t know why it was, but I was doing stupid things all night long.  Nobody else noticed or mentioned it to me, it still irks me to no end. 

The night started out with a whisper “Whatever you do, do not get your main saved on 10-man RS.”  To which I replied “er, okay…”  Took me awhile to realize “RS” is the new Ruby Sanctum instance.  I’m guessing we’re going to hit it with our regular 10-man team and they wanted to make sure they caught me before I went in with some random PUG “to try it out” or something. 

So I started on my dailies, after all with a new instance comes many, many wipes and I might as well get my finances in order.  I was almost finished with them when I got the 25-man invite.  At this point, it’s partially to see how I stack up against a larger group of people (I’m still relatively low on the dps for our 10-man, but I generally know what I’m doing which makes up for a lot) and partially to refine my techniques.  Because 25-man versions of some of the fights really get tricky especially in fights where distance from other players is key.  I’m well beyond going for Emblems of Frost on my Hunter, there’s not really all that much for him to buy anymore. 

Most of the regular 10-man people were there.  And interestingly, we actually had a surplus of healers for once.  That allowed my guildmate to go feral with his Druid instead of being a tree.  He’s a bit out of practice in that mode, and was complaining about how bad he sucked for a lot of it, but he got to a point where he was at least not consistently on the bottom of the dps totals. 

Marrowgar was a cakewalk.  With so much dps, spikes were gone in a few seconds and otherwise it was just dodging flames and shooting.  Deathwhisper was slightly different in that we two tanking it, one tank doing the left and back, the other doing the right.  Normally we’ve put a “mini-tank” at the back but we just skipped it this time.  Again, no problem taking Deathwhisper down.

Which came to my first instance of stupidity for the night.  Or first one I realized.  Because of the need to crowd control mind controlled raid members, Hunter’s generally have their Freezing Trap or Freezing Arrow ready.  (I actually setup both.)  So when the person right next to me got mind controlled, I immediately dropped my trap, expecting to see a large block of ice show up.

Instead, I see a large patch of white appear on the ground.  Takes me a few seconds to realize that instead of Freezing Trap, I had setup Frost Trap!  And since we were in the middle of the fight, it’s sort of hard for me to switch out my action keys to correct the problem.  I just felt amazingly stupid.

Then the Gunship battle, which should have been a cakewalk.  But it wasn’t for some reason.  At first, only melee dps went on the boarding party, but it was taking too long and some of us dps started jumping over.  However, we kept losing people, which was almost unheard of.  Then we realized that the problem was that the boarding tank wasn’t tanking High Overlord Saurfang in the right place! 

Normally, he’s tanked a bit off to the side, but on the edge of the ship where healers on the Alliance ship can still heal the tink.  Instead, he was being tanked near the center of the railing, right where many of the boarding party was landing!  Practically the same spot many of our boarding party was using as their landing point.  Which meant that people were eating Saurfang’s Cleaveright in the face.  I wasn’t affected because I come in from the side, but we lost a couple of dps before we realized what was going on.

But this fight is where my next piece of stupidity happened.  We had just finished taking out the mage on the Horde ship and was jumping back to the Alliance ship.  Except, I messed up and had clicked the side of the ship, insteasd of the railing.  And fell.  Fortunately, it immediately teleports you back to the ship but that was another definite “what the hell did I just do?” moments.

Then came the Deathbringer Saurfang fight.  We had three Hunter’s, which usually means one of each end and one near the center.  Except a Warlock took over one of those spots and refused to move, and for some reason the other two Hunter’s lined up on the right side, one in front of the other.  I ended up being on the left, “inside” of the Warlock, uncomfortably close to the stairs.

I was very tempted to kite a Blood Beast right through the Warlock but decided against being a dick.  Instead, I would target a Blood Beast on the far side from me (which is harder than you think with a whole bunch of melee dancing around between us.)  It was actually a bit more restful since I really didn’t move all that much.  I was able to help take out the Blood Beast I originally would target and just spin around to assist with the others.  I just really wish that Warlock would realize that since Hunter’s are also the emergency kiters, having that clear area to play with is invaluable, whereas he just has to shoot stuff.

This time, instead of doing the Crimson Hall, we instead went to Plagueworks.  Rotface was first.  This fight was relatively smooth, although the one time I had Mutated Infection on me, I was unfortunately too close to another person with it when they cleansed both of us.  Which meant our small oozes appears right next to each other and immediately formed a second big ooze.  Fortunately, our ooze tank saw it and changed course immediately to merge the two big oozes.  I was half afraid I’d have to do my kiting tank job again.

Which wouldn’t have been good because I realized near the very end of the fight that I had been in Aspect of the Viperfor practically the whole fight!  I had switched aspects when we were prepping for the fight and forgot to switch back!  So I had gimped my dps the whole fight!

Why hadn’t I noticed?  Well, depending on what people are casting, some fights my mana bar doesn’t drain all that fast so the fact my bar was full whenever I glanced at it didn’t register.  I did see I was low on the dps numbers, however it still had me at about 12 place in damage done overall in the fight.  So out of 18 dps, I wasn’t at the bottom, nor at the top, which is normal for me.

Then on Festergut, more insanity.  I, like the other Hunters, were on the left side.  We had worked out that in general, if there were too many spores either in range or melee, it would be the one marked with a skull would be moving.  And for the most part it worked out.

However, the one time I got a spore, so did the person right next to me.  So, since I was the Hunter and still can do quite  a bit of damage on the move, I thought I’d go and run to the right side of the room.  Except, the other person was also running along with me.  So I stopped, we gathered and the other person covered the right side. 

Okay, so we hadn’t quite worked out that scenario, but we recovered nicely.  Then we had two spores in the melee.  However, neither one ran out and the third spore was far on the right side of the room.  So, the entire left group collapsed onto melee, including the three Hunters, all of whom ended up standing in melee range of the boss, not exactly where we can dps all that well.

And that’s when my computer froze up!  While not exactly my fault, I was half worried that I would wipe the raid.  I knew my Hunter would have been stuck in melee range, did we have enough other range to prevent Vile Gas from being cast on the melee?  I frantically restarted my computer to get back in.

Fortunately, they managed to down him while I was out.  While a d/c isn’t necessarily blamed on a person, if it also caused a raid wipe, well, the chances of me being invited to further raids would drop. 

Then it was on to Professor Putricide.  We managed to wipe on our first try.  Phase 1 was fine, transition was perfect.  Phase 2 was slightly messier, with several people not kiting the Gas Cloudcorrectly, either letting it catch up and aoe people or dragging it far away from the rest of us dps trying to kill it.  So by the time we got to Phase 3, we were down several dps and healers and we just couldn’t compensate.

As we discussed going to a three tank setup for this fight instead of our normal two, I discovered my biggest and stupidest mistake of the night.  I had the wrong ammo!  I had my Saronite Razorheads, my PvE ammo, equipped instead of my Iceblade Arrows, my raid ammo!  I had handicapped my dps THE WHOLE DAMN RAID!  No wonder my dps was so low, even when I wasn’t sitting around in Aspect of the Viper!  I wanted to just hide in a corner…but we weren’t quite finished yet.

Our second try was a little better, but not by much.  Both transitions were mistimed.  Which left an add up while going into the third phase and we missed the enrage timer.  By this time, it was rather late so we called it. 

So it was an entire night of me making stupid rookie mistakes.  Very disappointing to myself.  Tonight we’re stupposed to try the new Ruby Sanctum on 25-man before going back into Icecrown.  Guess I’m off to go study what that fight is all about…and making sure I have the right ammo!